sunflowers and combine fires
helping a guy cut sunflowers...i am done with my harvest for the year so am doing custom harvesting till harvest is all done or get buried in snow i guess.....those of you who farm but have never harvested sunflowers you dont know what you are missing!!....damn things i hatem had small fire on my combine today...and the guy i am helping got his on fire bad enough thats its down till he gets parts for it burned a belt off of it a speed sensor and some wires....i always take a couple hundred gallons of water to field with pump and ect.....all so people can feed their birdies....to bad they don't crush more of them and make fuel out of them....we grow the black oil type here they run 40% or higher oil content....so if you feed birds sunflowers thats the kind we grow here
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did they dry down there? up here they still seem to be wet...the ones the wind has'nt gotten[:)] 0 -
i left some of one guys that are wet yet these i am on now are dry....alot of fields around here are down tangled up messes..some look like you took a rock roller and rolled them flat to the ground.....any body who asks me to combine that kinda of mess get told not no but hell no 0 -
Do deer really like sunflowers?Had someone tell me deer love 'em.If so I want to plant some in the spring. 0 -
yes i guess so...there was ten plus deer and crap load of pheasants in the half sec we was cutting on today 0 -
Thats all I needed to hear. 0 -
quote:Originally posted by frog21
Do deer really like sunflowers?Had someone tell me deer love 'em.If so I want to plant some in the spring.
Yes they do. Elk also. I have seen a herd of elk enter a sunflower field and just walk down the row eating the heads.0 -
now that i think of it,had some mule deer in one field mine few years ago just about run them over with combine before they would move out of the way....they stayed right in them till last round was harvested 0 -
Deer love em and so do Doves. Hunting buddy put out a large sunflower field just to shoot doves.[:D] 0 -
What makes the sunflowers so prone to causing fires?
I am only used to dry soybeans causing problems. The one thing you hate to see is a combine on fire. Growing up we had our fair share of them, but non of them caused to0 much damage to the combine. One fire burnt a field of corn stubble, about 20 acres or so, nothing big. We had a fire the day before my wedding, I traded with my dad so he could get ready for rehearsal and feed. Nothing like being late to your wedding rehearsal because your putting out a fire on a windy day. [:D] That was the third one in a week.0 -
What head do you use on the combine for this, corn or bean head? Never seen them harvested before. 0 -
shoff the dust is very easy to start smoldering starts on exhaust maifold or turbocharger the flies off from engine fan and starts it were ever it lands......the stuff is nasty several years ago i knew of fifteen combine put out of commission one fall...have heard beans can be had also.
sarge most here use the John Deere 50A series rowcrop heads to harvest them....i have a 854A and 853A...ie wide row and narrow in 8 row versions.....plan on building a 1253A out of the 853A ie turn the 8 row into a twelve row..
oh yea, if anybody is into bug collecting.....you can find every bug imaginable in sunflowers when they are blooming......everything likes sunflowers...[:D]0 -
Shoff, you know what works good for keeping out in the field for fires is....i keep back a 250gal chemical shuttle that you can hook up a 2 inch gas engine transfer pump to then use a like an 1" fertilizer tubing and i have a fire hose nozzle i ordered out of Northern hyd...or northern tools i think it is called now......keep two hoses with fire nozzles handy to beable to use with shuttle or thousand gal fertilizer nurse tanks for grass fires and ect. 0 -
quote:What makes the sunflowers so prone to causing fires?
quote:we grow the black oil type here they run 40% or higher oil content
Once the dust gets them going those little seeds produce a bit of heat. Didn't you do the burn the sunflower seed thing in chemistry?0 -
once you smell sunflower dust burning you remember it well....very strong smell..and sticks with you.....i showered and everything and i can still smell it yet. 0 -
Harvest must be rolling right along for you and the other surrounding states. I have a cousin in Illinois tell me everyone is done there also. Don't know what's going on here as we have alot of crops still in the field. I suppose the farmers are letting the corn dry out so they don't have to spend so much on LP to dry it. Sure seems slow around here. 0 -
sarge we are behind here this year normally long since done with flowers by this time of year...though with a big as equipment is now it can be taken off real fast....12 to 16 row heads make short work out of it most of the time......propane here now is close to 2.00/gal now....i dried some corn while bac when it was in the 70's for temps didnt take much propane that way. 0 -
quote:Originally posted by cowdoc
shoff the dust is very easy to start smoldering starts on exhaust maifold or turbocharger the flies off from engine fan and starts it were ever it lands......the stuff is nasty several years ago i knew of fifteen combine put out of commission one fall...have heard beans can be had also.
Same thing happens with beans only it usually has to be a little windy out. What really is acts as a starter sometimes is the backside of the pulleys and clutch. No matter what you do you can't keep the cleaned out. Get a little something off the exhaust and poof. The type of fires that always worried me the most was a fire caused by a bearing. It seems that the two times I remember a bearing causing a fire it was hard to put out. Including the time I said above about the field catching on fire.
We always kept our sprayer nurse tank ready. Never had to use it though.0
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