00:00 Coming at you from about 40 feet above Rell Farms here in Jackson, Tennessee with Johnny Rell talking about his new grain drying system. 00:07 And more importantly, penciling it out, the economics of adding a pretty significant investment, but more importantly, a substantial amount of upgrade in your grain drying capacity. 00:16 You showed me what you called the green machine, your batch drying system that you used years ago. You upgraded to this wind About four years 00:24 Ago. Okay, so tell me what I'm looking at or what I'm standing on and what they're looking at. 00:28 This is a superior mixed flow dryer. Um, we started looking at dryers about five, six years ago. Finally made a decision. And the reason we go with a mix flow dryers just cause of how it handles the 00:39 grain conditions, the grain, and it's just really gentle on the grain. The fans on the bottom. 00:43 It reclaims the heat very well and it's just been a good fit for us. All right. So, uh, capacity wise, that's the first question. 00:50 You did 300 bushels of drying on average. I mean, it probably varies if it's on the, on the percentage moisture in the crop. Your old best drag system was? 00:59 Yeah, it was, uh, just a portable 12 foot grain dryer. 300 bushels an acre on average. Well, 300 bushel an hour. An hour. I'm sorry. Yeah. 01:06 And so like this one right here at five point removal is rated at about 38, 3900 bushel an hour, but you 01:11 Don't do five point removal. And another video, we talked about your, shall I say habit or practice of harvesting pretty high yield moisture, corn, 01:19 high moisture corn because you think you'd get more yield and your buddy Brian Abs talked about that. So tell me about your practice of harvesting wet corn. 01:26 Yeah, so where we're located at in west Tennessee, a lot of times end of August, 1st of September, there's a really good premium for grain for corn. 01:34 So we got this dryer here and we're able to go in and start harvesting around 30%. And by doing that, that allows us to get two or three weeks, 01:40 sometimes more ahead of the, the other people in harvesting. So we get a better premium. And this dryer can handle it, you know, 01:46 wet 30% moisture grain is very hard to have. It's almost Like silage buddy. Yeah. So, uh, 01:51 I mean this doesn't flow through the combine near as fluidly. I mean, what, What is it? The combine's kind of handled it fine. 01:56 The combine really doesn't know a difference. You just gotta worry about going in the wet bin and making sure you're getting that corn. Plenty of air, plenty of circulation. 02:02 Okay. So getting it through the wet bin, then it goes from the wet bin to here to the dryers, the silos or the, sorry, the semis are dumping and then, then it goes from there to here. 02:09 Sometimes you get Clogs. Yeah, you can get clogs and I mean it's just cuz that corn sets up pretty hard when it's that wet. The 02:15 Economics of it. Your buddy Brian said that you can absolutely run the numbers on this. So talk about this is not a cheap piece of equipment. 02:20 This is a pretty substantial, uh, investment. But again, it's also a substantial grain drying thing. 02:25 You're getting a lot of bushels through here. Yeah. The, the studies that we've seen, and before we bought this dryer, we did several years of replicated studies where we would harvest 25 plus 02:33 percent moisture and then come back at 15%. So that's just 10 point removal. And we were senate seeing anywhere from, uh, 02:39 eight to 12% yield gain by doing that. Say it again. Eight to 12% yield gain by, by harvesting at 25% versus waiting to 50%. And so when you're talking about 200 bushel, 02:48 you're talking as much as like, you know, 20 more bushels. That's right. Six bucks, $108. That's right. 02:52 And you're not paying that much to dry that wet corn. No, this, this dry here is really efficient. Uh, 10 point removal is less than 8 cents a bushel. So it's 8 cents total. Yes, 03:01 8 cents total. A bushel electricity and gas. I'm counting the equipment of just factual. You, you honestly believe that you're getting every a, 03:07 a bushel taken a bushel a percent taken off per bushel for less than a penny per point? 03:12 Yes. Okay. Correct. When you looked at making this decision, what did you, why did you land on superior? So 03:18 I called, we looked at several companies and, and when I was reaching out to Superior, I liked how their fans were mounted at the bottom. Every, 03:25 there's no moving pieces that, that you can't reach from the ground itself. Got it. A lot of companies put fans all over the dryer itself. 03:30 That's just a maintenance issue. Cause not To mention you and I just climbed up here these uh, 35 or 40 some odd feet and uh, 03:37 I'd hate to be hustling a bunch of buckets of tools up here or let alone a 300 pound motor up there. 03:42 Yeah, you don't wanna do that. And you know, and the other reason we like superior is the ability to expanse. And we put this dryer in, 03:48 we put a dryer in that was a third bigger than we needed. And then it didn't take very long. We went to a third combine, 03:53 so that took up that, but we were already, we weren't maxed out. We were able to have, and then this dryer here is just like a lot of them, 03:59 but you just take the top off and you just start stacking more dryers so I don't have to add more motors. Everything's already there. The flame, the burner, 04:05 everything stays the same. And To me, this, it comes in here and, and our buddy Brian Adams said, uh, it's not like a batch dryer where it just comes in and gets all hot. 04:12 You liked the idea that the way it comes in here, it moves back and forth. Uh, he had like a pinto game on prices, right? 04:19 I thought only retired people watch prices. Right. But you know, Brian's younger, he proved it strongly, I guess. Okay. Anyway, how's it work? 04:24 So like the triangles here that you see, there's actually more triangles inside that you don't see and every time the grain flows over the triangle, it flips it and it inverts it back and forth. 04:32 So technically the corn that comes in on the left side could end up on the right side and that just keeps you from having any hotspots in that dryer. A lot of, 04:39 lot of older dryers that are portable dryers, the inside is extremely hot. It could be 180 plus degrees, the outside might just be 120, 04:46 but there's really not a good way to mix inside those columns. These dryers, that's kind of what their name's built on mix flow and it just keeps that thing 04:53 at a constant, constant consistency, temperature and Moisture. Got it. Grain comes in at the top, comes down to the bottom. By the time he gets there, it's dry. That's where we're heading next. 05:01 We go down to the bottom of this dryer. We're gonna talk about where the grain comes out, the temperature comes out at, and most importantly, we're gonna talk about those motors because Johnny, 05:08 one of the compelling reasons he bought this particular brand was because where the motor placement is, we're going there next. All right. So Brian, 05:15 in a previous video you talked about the efficiency of this. Okay. The burner is up there, the fans are down here. 05:21 When you get to the top and the old fashioned grain dryers, we were blowing a lot of warm air out into the ambient environment. 05:27 It's wasteful. Tell me about how this works and actually saves some of that. Yep. So this system here, Damien more or less, I guess the best way to put it, 05:33 either reclaims or recycles the heat that's in it. Now of course the heat has to dissipate at some point out of there. Uh, but this is designed to do so in a very efficient manner. 05:41 It's not losing any of the heat that it's creating. And as it falls down, it's getting progressively cooler and cooler and cooler. 05:48 And once it gets below the burners and before it makes its way to the bell or to the drag system, whatever's carrying it outta here back into the bins, 05:54 it's gonna be at that ambient air temperature. So it really does a Good job of holding its heat in and making I guess the most, 06:00 the most efficient use of Speaking of temperature. The old thing used to be, yeah, you got your grain dried down, it's a hundred and some odd degrees, 06:08 you're putting into a 40 degree bin in October, whatever, then your grain bin goes through a sweat, then you can all start to have some, 06:15 uh, condition issues. So tell me about this. Yeah, so when the grain comes outta this, once it passes the burner, the last say 10 foot is in the cool down mode. 06:23 So as soon as the corn goes into the conveyor, it's ambient temperature, real close to ambient temperature outside. 06:27 So all of a sudden you're putting in outdoor temperature type of corn into a grain bin. That's the same as the outdoor temperature. That's exactly right. 06:34 Haven't had any sweats issues. No. You, this year, how many years for this will Be the, going in the fifth year, fifth 06:38 Year of this unit? Um, I think the next thing is talking about the ease of operation because you know what, hopefully we're making them better but also less complicated. 06:48 So we're gonna move over to the control panel now and give you a look from that angle. All right. Here we're at the control panel for this huge, uh, 06:55 green drying system that Johnny put in. And I guess he's pretty excited about it. It looks easy enough to me. Doesn't overwhelm me. I don't know what I'm doing exactly, 07:03 but there's not a lot of like open electronics. I'm gonna get hurt. Yeah, It's real simple. Everything's here that you need to know. 07:08 If it's loading grain, it tells you up here. If it's unloading grain, it tells you, it tells you if wet bin runs outta green. 07:13 But the biggest thing is when you start, we just start over here on the left and work our way, right? You just start flipping 'em to own and auto and they'll start kicking in and the 07:21 burner lights. And once the burner lights, all the fans are on running, it tells you that it's got a five 10 moisture master over there that'll sit 07:27 there and control the moisture. You just set it on the moisture you want it to be on when you hit enable five 10 and it's taking off and it run and it might take it a couple hours to get 07:35 leveled out, but it actually, if the moisture starts coming in three or four points higher, it'll slow down. Or if it starts drying up, it'll speed itself up. So 07:42 That's the other thing. I mean, do you spot check this? Do you get where the discharge is and pull you a cup and go and run it and say, is it actually if you're trying to take it down to 15 and 07:50 A half? Yeah. Yeah. 15 and a half, 16, something like that. Yeah, because You, you wouldn't have been at 16. You can still knock it down with some air. 07:55 That's right. And so we check it through, you know, throughout that first day we'll check it several times, but after we get everything calibrated and set, 08:01 really you just turn it on and walk away. Never Had an issue. No, you Don't have an issue. All 08:05 Right. Efficiency again, is this part of why it's efficient? Why is this more efficient than the systems 20 years ago? 08:11 The reason this thing's so efficient is, is just because of the, the technology that's in what's coming in and going out of that dryer. So, 08:17 you know, basically it's just simple switches that are running the dryer itself, but the brains behind it that moisture master and like I said, 08:23 you set it up and you have it calibrated, it's coming out pretty much spot on all day long and, and taking out those inco, you know, on our our type farming operations, 08:31 we might have a 30 40 acre heel that's 20% we may fall off in a bottom on the back side of that heel and it could be 30%, right? This dryer can handle that. 08:39 Yeah, you're Bringing, you're bringing in some mixed, you're bringing some mixed, uh, mixed bag of moisture and 08:43 It works great with the superior dryer cuz of the mix float and how it constantly mix. And so you might be over drying it sometimes, 08:48 but when it gets done, mix that together, it usually comes out pretty much Many consistent products. All right. Answer the, 08:54 the skeptical farmer out there that's saying, yeah, you know what? I don't harvest 30% moisture corn, I'm in a different part of the world. 09:00 There's no reason for me to do that. I'm gonna get some big basis premium. Uh, and also I think Johnny's just spent a whole bunch of money on a big fancy 09:07 system that I'll never need because it's probably just cost him a whole bunch of money. You'll bring me back to the efficiency. 09:12 Yeah. So it just helps us out from the, the combine efficiency, getting the crop out in a timely fashion and hopefully to have without having 09:19 any type of yield loss from wind storms because we can control that with a, with a product like this 09:23 Because you can get in the field sooner before remnants of a hurricane come in in October. No 09:28 Stalks are healthy growing, you know, everything's still green and healthy. That's the easiest time to show that 09:32 Our man, your man Brian Adams gave us a number and it was $50 and 88 cents. But I'm not sure exactly what it equates to in a previous video. 09:38 How do I make $50 and 88 cents net based on doing this? Well, you know, what we've been seeing is anywhere from eight to 12% yield increase. 09:45 So in a 200 bushel environment, I mean you talked about that earlier. You know, you're getting close to 20 bushel. Yep. $6 corn, that's 120 bucks. 09:52 It doesn't take, you Know, doesn't take $120 to dry down that much. It Takes $20 to dry it down. Yeah, you're still pocketing a hundred bucks. Yeah, 09:59 we had it figured in when we did that that year, we built the Excel program. They figured in the dryer costs, the machine costs everything running it. 10:05 And so it's still a big net return on your event. Net, net net after everything was 51 bucks, including amortizing this great Roi. 10:12 His name is Johnny Rell. My name is Damien Mason. We're talking to you about his superior grain drying system he put in. He's been running it now for long enough years. 10:19 It's been quite a trial obviously in in our first month. You got it here. Uh, and you know what, 10:24 you can share this with somebody that's considering whether they need to upgrade and update their grain drying system. Lots of capacity here. 10:30 Lots of stuff to learn. That's what we do at Extreme Ag. Extreme Ag is all about giving you information, mistakes that we have made, uh, 10:37 trials that we were pulling off so that you can up your farming game. Share this with somebody that can benefit from it. Extreme ag.farm, 10:42 literally hundreds and hundreds of videos just like this. Podcasts that we produce all for you to learn and benefit from. Till next time, 10:50 Johnny Verell. Damian Mason, extreme Ag Farm.