Land forming contractor Bruce Hoolihan says a move to new GPS technology has boosted productivity and delivered cost-effective results for growers.
Bruce Hoolihan, who has operated Hoolis Land Forming at Dirranbandi for 17 years, predominantly working with cotton growers, recently upgraded his two machines from laser leveling to FarmscanAg’s GPS based LevelGuide software program.
The business uses two buckets in tandem for levelling country, especially when there are larger cuts and fills, however one bucket is generally used for finishing paddocks.
LevelGuide is integrated within the wider AgGuide mapping and guidance program with auto-steer, implement guidance, variable rate control and spray control, including boom section switching.
Mr Hoolihan said while laser leveling would only work up to about 400 metres from the base station, LevelGuide could work up to 10 kilometres.
He usually works within five kilometres for accuracy.
The laser also has accuracy issues during major temperature changes around daylight and sunset, he said.
“With the GPS, we can go 24 hours a day if needed,’’ Mr Hoolihan said.
“As a result, we are now picking up an extra hour or two per day, which adds up by the end of the year.
“During winter, we could only do about seven hours a day with the laser because it moved so much, whereas with LevelGuide, we can do a lot more hours during the winter without losing accuracy.’’
He said bankless irrigation tasks were mainly designed in planes and while laser levelling only offered single plane setups, LevelGuide offered multi-plane setups.
“You can design whole paddocks with roads, drainage and contours – and you are not having to go back to reset the laser.’’
FarmscanAG’s LevelGuide incorporates auto cross leveling, allowing operators to tilt buckets during cut and fill, and to create curved surfaces for better drainage.
“If you are doing a road and you want a chamfer on one side, you can set the tilt of the bucket to do that automatically,” Mr Hoolihan said.
“I recently did a paddock with six triangle shapes, with main falls and cross falls.
“With laser, you would have to move more dirt and always be setting up [and] we are trying to bring the costs down,” he said.
He said the simplicity and easy-to-follow screen layout of the LevelGuide program was impressive.
“It’s very simple to use,” Mr Hoolihan said.
You have a screen in the cab with a map of the paddock and shaded colours to know where you are up to,’’
“After the surveying, the design is given to us on a USB stick to load in,” he said..
“You can hotspot your phone to the computer and you can ring the FarmscanAG team if you are having any issues and they will help out and be able to change things on your screen.”
Steve Hanlon or Landform Survey and Design, said there was more emphasis on design with GPS-controlled machines.
“We can now do ‘smoothing design’ rather than a ‘planing design’, if that is what the situation requires,” he said.
“With the LevelGuide system, it is simple to apply either to the paddock.
“The Ezigrade design software allows the designer to incorporate channels, drains, roads, pads, dams or features into the design and the operator can see them on the screen.
He said previously with lasers, flat planes were made usually with multiple planes to a paddock.
“A paddock was set up in a series of tiles with planes sloping in different directions.’’
“These days, if we want water to go down a furrow or bay in a paddock, we can have different grades all the way down,” Mr Hanlon said.
“Instead of making large flat planes, we now smooth it so the slope is constantly downhill.
“You set the design up so that it has maximum and minimum slopes to minimise the cut and fill.’’
He said laser leveling was time consuming, set-up times were a significant part of the job and compromises had to be made between set-up time and the volumes of soil moved.
This generally lead to designs and leveling jobs that moved large amounts of soil, causing farmers to consider land leveling to be too costly, he said.
Design software like Ezigrade, from Foresoft Pty Ltd, allows for designs that can set parameters to simply “get the water off a paddock in any direction’’, reducing the calculated volumes of cut and fill significantly,” Mr Hanlon said.
Coupling this with the LevelGuide, GPS-controlled equipment, set-up times are now a small part of jobs and volumes of soil moved are greatly reduced.
“This generally results in very low cost solutions to costly drainage issues,” Mr Hanlon said.
