"IS it going to stand up to our country?"
When you farm in tight sodic clays, that's always one of the major questions you grapple with when considering a new seeding bar.
After originally buying a farm many others wouldn't consider and last year breaking 60 of 72 tynes and having to weld the drawbar up to complete seeding, this challenge has just gone to the extreme level.
Enter the latest 24-metre Morris Quantum air drill for 2024, and after completing more than one third of the seeding program this season, including in dry conditions, it is all systems go.
Andrew and Francine Cook, together with their son, Max, farm some of the most difficult country in the Salmon Gums area in the south eastern Wheatbelt, comprising a lot of heavy, tight, sodic gravelly clays, also interspersed with some granite rock.
After venturing to the region from South Australia with his father in the early 1980s, Andrew and his family bought the Salmon Gums property in 1994 before also leasing and later acquiring a neighbouring property and then adding another farm north of Grass Patch in 2019.
This has allowed their crop production area to steadily expand to about 3300 hectares, also sadly at the expense of a quality sheep enterprise, which is declining due to the poor market returns and government policy.
The Cooks have undertaken significant work to improve the country with lime and gypsum applications, and in recent years have achieved average yields of 3-4 tonnes/hectare.
They grow predominantly wheat, barley, canola and some faba beans, while they also plan to sow field peas again in the near future.
The family has been using older Morris bars for some time and has loved them, but admits the tynes have not been strong enough for their tight country.
A Morris Magnum chisel plough provided 340-kilogram tyne breakout and then a Maxim III air drill allowed a step up in size to 18 metres, however the breakout was a little low at 250 kilograms.
Andrew Cook said the latest Quantum air drill, purchased through McIntosh & Son at Esperance, offered 363kg tyne breakout and its weight and interlocking frame design, compared with other butt-welded bars, provided great strength.
"Hopefully it will reduce the cracking," Mr Cook said.
"We knew it wouldn't be heavy enough for some of our country, but nothing can get in here with splitter boots because it is so tight.
"It's like a concrete mix, in spite of applying more than 6t/ha of gypsum over the last 10 years."
In dry conditions in some of their toughest country, hydraulic tyne pressures of 1400psi are still not achieving the digging depth for faba beans to allow about 150kg downforce packing pressure.
In better areas, this is being achieved at 600psi tyne pressures.
Mr Cook said they were pleasantly surprised and impressed with the Quantum air drill's performance and were planning to keep it for more than a decade - "so it's got to be tough to go the distance".
"It's a big investment and we are really happy with the strength of the frame and drawbar," he said.
"You can see it has got it - it is solid and strong.
"It's doing the job, getting into the tight seedbed across 80-foot, and hopefully over a longer period it will prove robust in our conditions.
"In this rainfall area (345 millimetres annually), you have to be in the ground before it rains if you can.
"Normally we want 50 per cent of our program dry-seeded if need be in April, and some years up to 100 per cent dry seeded before the end of May."
Mr Cook said they were really happy the new air drill would attack any condition and come out the other side, saying that was a big ask where they were.
"We also like the softness of the breakout and recoil compared with conventional spring release tynes," he said.
"It is much softer on the trip mechanism, which is pleasing and will hopefully translate to longer trip mechanism life."
The Cooks followed in the footsteps of two of their neighbours, who had been using Morris Quantum air drills for the past three years, albeit in largely more loamy soils, and they took their investment up to the 24m machine set on 30-centimetre tyne spacing to suit their tramline farming system, which is based on 3m wheel centres.
Tynes are fitted with narrow, paired-row Rootboots for seed placement, which Mr Cook said were "like a surfboard to get in our country when it's dry", but they were very accurate at seed and fertiliser placement and they're still dry sowing canola at a consistent depth of 15-20mm.
"They are robust boots and can handle our country well," he said.
The dual chute head kit also centre bands urea, which has suited their infrastructure since the late 1990s.
Mr Cook said, importantly, the Morris Quantum's hydraulic parallelogram tyne was performing to their expectation, whereas many other parallelogram systems struggled to maintain seeding depth in their soils, especially with a splitter boot.
"Seed placement is the key and with Gilgai holes (crabholes) everywhere here, this was a problem with our last bar - and if your seed's not in the ground, then it won't germinate in marginal conditions," he said.
"This (Quantum) bar is proving that it will drop into those areas and, even coming out of them, it will seed at what it is set at, so we are expecting germinations to improve 10-15pc from the last bar.
"We should pick up 5pc extra yield and that will help pay for the machine.
"We have canola firing out of the ground shortly after recent rains."
Mr Cook said the evolution of the tyne angle and parallelogram pivot point geometry on the new Quantum air drills was a game changer and was also providing for excellent trash flow.
"We run chaff carts and other parallelogram bars that we've had here on demo couldn't handle the trash, but we are happy with the way the Quantum has handled the chaff residue," he said.
Max said he took the Quantum through one chaff heap the stock had grazed down and had missed getting burnt that was still "two to three feet high" and there was no blocking up with the bar.
Automatic variable pressure packing linked with their Topcon X35 controller, as well as automatic lifting of tynes at the end of runs, has been another great feature for the Cooks.
"The X35 starts to warn you when your pressures are becoming too low," Mr Cook said.
"A side benefit of this is that we are generating packing pressure maps created by the controller, so we're truthing paddocks with what soil type you can see from the tractor.
"We can use this valuable data to overlay with other data sets such as EM38 sodium and gamma radiometric maps and harvest yield maps etcetera.
"This will assist our precision farming technicians to more precisely generate gypsum application shape files for our VRT spreader, applying higher rates where it will do more for soil health and therefore production."
Other good features of the Morris Quantum air drill included the stainless steel primary airpipes and delivery heads used with the machine, which would help prolong the life of the delivery system.
"It also has excellent flotation and a well-designed folding mechanism for a 24m bar, which folds back into a more square shape for transport with a tight, triple-fold stance," Mr Cook said.
He said the McIntosh & Son team at Esperance also had provided good support and had helped with the install and setting up of the new seeding rig.
