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Farmer-Inventors Create Corn Cob Harvesting Equipment

By Mr Ethanol | November 14, 2007

Agri News:
Three Nebraska farmer-inventors have developed equipment to harvest corn cobs and other biomass that will be sought for cellulosic ethanol production.

The inventions were described at last week’s Biobased Industry Outlook Conference at Iowa State University in Ames.

“Just a handful of us are suffering through the challenges to get (a biomass harvesting) system figured out,” said Ty Stukenholtz. He and his twin brother, Jay, have been working on inventions that remove cobs and other residue from the field for 11 years.

The biggest challenge is that corn harvest can’t be slowed.

“Harvesting corn has to be the priority,” Ty said. “Farmers can’t take the chance that their $4 crop will be lost in the field.”

The brothers farm some of their own ground and also custom harvest in Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri. They’ve sold cobs for industrial production, for feed and bedding and to burn for energy.

“We have a lot of experience in trucking, grinding, and we’ve even bagged cobs for one outfit,” said Ty.

The Stukenholtz brothers farm in southeast Nebraska where the ground is hilly and pulling a wagon behind the combine doesn’t work well, Ty said. The brothers have ag engineering degrees from the University of Nebraska. Their patented and trademarked invention, the Residue Recovery System, is a custom-built add-on that can be used with any combine. The Residue Recovery System consists of the CleanBoot and the TopTank. The CleanBoot is attached to the back of the combine and uses power created by the harvesting process to capture the desired material as it falls through a specialized sieve. Unwanted residue is ejected. The cobs travel to a U-trough auger and beater, then into an air stream up to the collection TopTank. The TopTank is mounted at the top of the combine’s original grain tank. It is specifically sized to fill at the same rate as the grain tank and is designed to move laterally past the harvesting head for unloading. The controls for the collection tank run off the original factory hydraulics on the combine handset. The brothers have partnered with Beth Pihlblad to form Ceres Agriculture to promote their machinery and harvesting services. They are fine-tuning the equipment to harvest various types of residue. The machinery will be in limited production in 2008.

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