Grainswest - Tech 2023

Tech 2023 grainswest.com 15 BY IAN DOIG • PHOTOS BY ZOLTAN VARADI Inventor of solar grain dryer hopes others follow his renewable lead Conditioning secrets served piping hot O n Rob Baerg’s farm near Rosemary, a rectangular array of used aluminum irrigation pipes is nestled within an L-shaped configuration of six hopper bottom grain bins. GrainsWest visited the farm on a day that was not particularly sunny, but the pipes were surprisingly hot. Laid east to west, this is the energy intake of Baerg’s solar grain dryer. As a 35-year-old carpenter from Surrey, B.C., Baerg purchased a quarter-section near Rosemary in 1988, “for the price of a house in Calgary.” With generous advice and rental equipment from neighbours, he switched careers and became a farmer. His skills in carpentry and concrete served him well as he renovated the property’s rundown farmhouse. He and wife Joyce raised four children and expanded their acres. Baerg now farms wheat, canola and alfalfa with leafcut- ter bees on two quarter-sections under irrigation. The dryer site has a power connection Baerg had installed with the intent of building a shop. It now runs a seven horsepower electric fan that draws air through the pipes and into a duct system linked to each bin. A wooden gate at each bin intake can be slid in or out to control airflow. Analyzed as part of a Team Alberta Crops grain conditioning study released in April 2022, the system was found to consume on average 78 per cent less energy than a comparable in-bin system when drying wheat. Materials to build such a unit, including 60 sections of pipe (he now uses 90), pencil out at just over $19,000. GrainsWest: What spurred the idea to build a solar powered grain dryer? Rob Baerg: My neighbour Walter Neufeld and I used to dry grain together. He had a grain dryer, but it was a finicky thing, and we spent a lot of time trying to make that thing work. He eventually took it apart and hauled it out back. What prompted me to do this in the first place was I lost a bin of durum. On a wet September in 2000, Walter and I were having coffee, trying to think how we could dry grain differently. With aeration, you’re only adding the ambient air. If you can heat that air, you increase its ability to take on moisture. We got the idea irrigation pipes get very hot in the sun, so why not pull air through them? I set up 20 pipes and built a manifold and tried it for two years. It was slow, but it worked. It was just two cheap farmers who didn’t want to use natu- ral gas, because even that was getting pricey and that was our option. Maybe it’ll be taken off, but the carbon tax later added to it as well. GW: You were way ahead of your time. RB: It was before anybody was talking about global warming or carbon footprint. We weren’t doing it for those reasons, and I still don’t. I do it because it’s cheap. Once I built the system, the expense is electricity. Now I’m thinking of getting solar panels on