IT WAS the start of the 2015-2016 harvest when Chris Burchell got a phone call from his brother Frank letting him know he had a problem.
Frank was in the Ultima area, near Swan Hil in Victoria, and he was having troubles with a lentil crop and was worried their harvester might catch fire.
It was in that phone call, faced with a problem the brothers needed to do something about, that the Tornado Harvester Airflow System had its beginnings.
The brothers had been contract harvesting for three years then, they got into it in 2012 when a wet harvest meant they couldn't get a contractor to their 1200-hectare Wimmera cropping property "Myross", at Banyena in Victoria.
So they bought their own, and also provide a lot of other services - fertilising, fumigation and wick wiping among them.
But with Frank struggling near Ultima at the beginning of a heavy lentil harvest they decided a blower targeting potential hotspots where dust built up could be the answer.
Chris called Richard Nagorcka, of Horsham Hydraulics, to develop a sustem that put an end to dust build-up in harvester hot spots.
"The legumes are worse than there cereals," said Chris.
Faba beans, vetch, oil seeds, frosted barley, frosted wheat they can all cause problems," he said, "and in Queensland there's sunflowers".
Theories are that the pulse dust creates static electricity which causes the dust to be attracted to hot metal components of the harvester, such as the manifold or exhaust, where it then ignites.
Mr Nagorcka, an engineer, set about developing a blower system that could be fitted to the Burchells' harvester.
It took him about six months to develop and get ready for market.
Fitting it onto the harvester's hydraulics system meant designing a custom valve and then finding a manufacturer for it.
Denmark's Danfoss fitted the bill and the valve is now an integral part of the unit.
It's now more than two years on and Mr Nagorcka said 35 units had now been sold around Australia and feedback had all been positive.
In the cab it consists of a rev counter, an on/off switch and an alert buzzer if the revs drop too low. Like most good engineering solutions it's not overly complicated, "there's six nozzles fitted with diffusers", he said.
"A lot of people know about it now and we have had some positive feedback from insurance companies," he said at his AgQuip exhibit.
The units cost $16,000 fitted, plus GST and there is a course in accreditation to fit the machines.
Mr Nagorcka said insurers now do checklists of fire prevention efforts and possibly reward well-prepared operators.
