Patent Application
20060120836
This invention is in the field of agricultural air seeders, and in particular mechanisms for transferring agricultural product into the tanks of an air seeder.
Agricultural air seeders have one or more tanks for carrying agricultural product that is to be deposited on a field. Such tanks are commonly carried on a cart pulled either behind or ahead of a ground engaging implement, although on occasion the tanks are mounted directly on the implement. Typically, a conveyor with an intake hopper is mounted on the air seeder for receiving agricultural product from a transport vehicle and transferring it into the tanks. Although belt conveyors are known, these tank filling conveyors are most commonly auger conveyors.
These filling conveyors are designed to efficiently transfer large volumes of bulk agricultural product at high rates. When using an auger conveyor there is always product remaining in the conveyor after the filling event, and typically two or more different products are loaded into separate tanks with the same conveyor. Depending on the products and the situation, it is often desired that the products not be mixed by conveying the second product through the conveyor and thus carrying a remaining first product into the second product tank. To prevent such mixing when switching from one agricultural product to the other, the auger conveyor is reversed and the intake hopper is rotated on the tube such the remaining product is emptied from the conveyor tube and falls onto the ground. As air seeders have become larger, the conveyors have also become larger in diameter and length, such that the amount of product emptied from them after filling can be significant.
Depending on the value of the product, and the degree of urgency of the operator to complete the seeding task, this emptied material may be simply dumped on the ground and wasted, or received in a container and returned to the transport vehicle or carried up to the top hatch of the air seeder tank. With the large size of present day trucks and air seeder tanks, this is generally a hazardous, onerous and physically demanding task, with the result that even though the waste amount is economically significant, often the operator leaves the product on the ground instead of saving it. Alternatively, the product can be left in the container and used in the next filling event, however there is typically no convenient place to store or carry the filled or partially filled container when moving to the next filling event.
Many agricultural products, such as canola seed or inoculants, are applied at much lower rates than other agricultural products, such as wheat seed and fertilizer. These lower rate agricultural products are typically relatively expensive per pound, and are typically handled in small containers, commonly bags, that can be handled manually rather than in bulk.
Use of the conventional air seeder filling conveyor with smaller volumes of bagged agricultural product such as canola seed or inoculants is problematic. It can be cumbersome and inefficient to empty the bags into the large conveyor to load the product into the tank, especially when quite often only a few bags are loaded into the tank at any one filling event. The amount of bagged agricultural product that must be placed into an auger conveyor hopper before the auger begins to engage and load the product is typically quite large compared to the total amount of bagged product to be loaded into an air seeder cart tank per filling event. Thus the amount of bagged product that must be removed from the auger and auger hopper is relatively large compared to the amount that is actually loaded into the tank per filling event. The product that must be removed is also relatively expensive, and so when reversing to clean the auger conveyor, the remaining product must be caught in a container and either carried to the top of the seeder to dump into the tank, or left in a container to be used at the next filling event.
Instead of using the air seeder conveyor, these bagged agricultural products are often carried or thrown up and onto the top of the tank and dumped into the tank manually. This manual loading is physically very demanding and exposes the person loading the bagged product to risk of injury. Air seeder tanks can be quite high, and often the bags are thrown up onto a catwalk, and then lifted from the catwalk to the top of the tank. The bags may be damaged or even split open during such handling. Such manual loading is quite time-consuming, labor intensive, and requires that the operator be physically fit or may require a second person's assistance.
Similarly, during a typical air seeder calibration, considerable agricultural product will be fed from the metering devices of the air seeder into calibration boxes and then weighed to accurately determine the application rate of each metering device. As above, the calibration boxes must then be carried up and emptied into the tanks, returned to the transport vehicle, or kept to be used at a later filling event.
In order to reduce the manual effort required to carry bags to the top fill hatch for emptying, crane devices, such as generally disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,419,038 to Pendergraft, have been mounted on implements and used to lift bags up for emptying into agricultural product tanks. Each bag is attached to a hook or the like on the end of a cable, and then winched up and swung over the fill hatch of the tank.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus that overcomes problems in the prior art of transferring agricultural products from a transport vehicle into an air seeder tank.
The present invention provides, in one embodiment, an agricultural air seeder apparatus adapted for loading containers of agricultural products. The apparatus comprises an air seeder having at least one tank mounted thereon, the at least one tank having a top fill hatch for filling the tank with an agricultural product. A platform is adapted to carry a plurality of containers of agricultural product and a raising mechanism is attached to the air seeder and the platform and is operative to move the platform from a lowered vertical position to a raised vertical position adjacent to the top fill hatch while maintaining the platform in a substantially horizontal orientation.
In a second embodiment the invention provides an agricultural air seeder cart apparatus adapted for loading bagged agricultural products. The apparatus comprises a cart having at least one tank mounted thereon, the tank having a top fill hatch for filling the tank with an agricultural product. A platform is adapted to carry a plurality of bags of agricultural product, and a parallel arm assembly is pivotally attached at a first end thereof to the cart and pivotally attached at an opposite second end thereof to the platform. An extendable actuator is pivotally attached to the cart and pivotally attached to the arm assembly and is operative to move the platform from a lowered vertical position in proximity to the ground to a raised vertical position adjacent to the top fill hatch. The parallel arm assembly maintains the platform in a substantially horizontal orientation as the platform moves from the lowered vertical position to the raised vertical position.
The platform conveniently comprises end and side walls forming a box to keep the containers, typically bags, in place. The side walls can be configured to fold down or be removed to facilitate access and lifting larger loads.
The platform and raising mechanism can be oriented so that the platform can be positioned at the same height as the floor of a truck box, so that the truck can be backed up to the platform and bags can be easily transferred from the truck box to the platform. Typically the actuator will be a hydraulic cylinder attached to the parallel arm assembly and operated by a control adjacent to air seeder.
A transport lock can be provided to lock the platform at an intermediate vertical position for transport. In addition to transferring agricultural products, the platform can act as a temporary storage place for bags of agricultural products to be used later if required when the air seeder is at a location in the field remote from transport vehicles carry the required agricultural products. A storage compartment can be provided under the platform for convenient storage of calibration boxes, agricultural product containers, and the like.
While the invention is claimed in the concluding portions hereof, preferred embodiments are provided in the accompanying detailed description which may be best understood in conjunction with the accompanying diagrams where like parts in each of the several diagrams are labeled with like numbers, and where:
The present invention provides a platform 8 adapted to carry a plurality of agricultural product containers, illustrated as bags 12, and a raising mechanism 10 attached to the cart 5 and the platform 8 and operative to move the platform 8 from a lowered vertical position, as illustrated in
The illustrated embodiment shows the tanks 4 mounted on a cart 5 that is towed ahead of or behind a ground engaging seeding implement, as is common in the air seeder field. Air seeders are also known where the tanks 4 are mounted directly on a seeding implement, and in such air seeders the raising mechanism 10 would be attached to the seeding implement
In the embodiment illustrated in
The parallel arm assembly 20 comprises, as best illustrated in
It is contemplated that the parallel arm assembly 20 could also be configured to swing laterally with respect to the cart 5, however the illustrated embodiment where the parallel arm assembly 20 can only move up and down, and is fixed laterally, avoids problems of maneuvering the platform on uneven ground. The transport vehicle carrying containers of agricultural products to the air seeder can generally be maneuvered to a position adjacent to the platform without difficulty.
In the embodiment comprising the parallel arm assembly, a transport lock 14 is provided to selectively lock the platform 8 for transport of the cart 5 along the ground at an intermediate vertical position as illustrated in
While the bags 12 could simply be placed on the platform 8, the illustrated embodiment further comprises end walls 40 and side walls 42 extending up from the platform 8 to form a box for more securely containing the bags 12 on the platform 8. The side walls 42 are pivotally attached such that they can be released to fold down from the upright position or removed as illustrated in
The side walls 42 comprise upper pegs 44 and lower pegs 46 extending from each end thereof. The upper pegs 44 extend into corresponding upper slots 48 defined by the end walls 40 that extend upwardly and through the edges of the end walls 40. The lower pegs 46 extend into corresponding lower upright slots 50 defined by the end walls 40.
Thus gravity maintains the pegs 44, 46 at lower ends of the slots 48, 50 to maintain the side walls 42 in the upright position. Each side wall 42 can be lifted to move the upper pegs 44 up through the upper slots 48 to the edge of the side walls 40 and out of the upper slots 48 to allow the side wall 42 to fold down to facilitate loading and unloading the platform 8.
In the embodiment illustrated in
Alternatively as illustrated in
The illustrated embodiment also provides a configuration facilitating easy removal of the side walls 42 if desired to accommodate raising a load that does not conveniently fit in the box.
As best illustrated in
The lower pegs 46, slots 50, and release notches 54, 56 can be oriented to determine at a desired amount the angle below horizontal that is required to align the notches 54, 56 however it is contemplated that an angle greater than 15 degrees below the horizontal, and likely about 30 degrees will best provide convenient removal while preventing accidental removal.
In the illustrated embodiment, the platform 8 further comprises a lower storage compartment 60 under the platform 8 that is suitable for conveniently storing calibration boxes 62, as illustrated in
When reversing the conventional filling auger (not shown) to clean it for transfer of a different agricultural product, the cleaned out product may be caught in calibration box 62 or in a bag or like container and kept on the platform 8 for use at a later filling event, or the platform could be elevated to allow the operator to empty the cleaned out product into the appropriate tank 4. A tarp or like cover could be provided to cover the box formed by the end walls 40 and side walls 42 to protect such containers from weather and dust.
The transport lock 14, as best seen in
In the illustrated embodiment the lock bracket 70 is mounted on the inside of the lower arm 30 of the parallel arm assembly 20, and the pin 74 and pin bracket 76 are attached to the cart 5. Alternatively it is contemplated that the lock bracket 70 could instead be mounted on the cart 5, and the pin bracket 76 mounted on the parallel arm assembly 20.
The lock bracket 70 comprises a sloped portion 80 that bears against the lock pin 74 and pushes the lock pin 74 in an inward direction ID when the lock bracket 70 moves downward into contact with the end of the lock pin 74. When the lock bracket 70 has moved to an aligned position where the lock pin 74 and pin hole 72 are aligned, the lock pin 74 moves outward into the pin hole 72 in response to the bias force applied to it by the spring 78. Once inserted in the pin hole 72, the lock pin 74 keeps the platform locked at the intermediate vertical level illustrated in
Thus to transport the cart, with the lock bracket 70 above the lock pin 74 the operator releases the lock pin 74 by turning it to disengage the roll pin 77 from the shoulder 79 and allow the lock pin 74 to move in direction OD in response to the bias force of the spring 78, and then operates the actuator control 82 to lower the parallel arm assembly 20 to engage the lock pin 74 in the pin hole 72.
The pin hole 72 in the illustrated embodiment is generally key-hole shaped, as illustrated in
Initially, when the parallel arm assembly 20 and attached platform 8 move down, the sloped portion 80 of the lock bracket 70 pushes the lock pin 74 inwardly until it is aligned with the lower portion 72A of the pin hole 72. Since this lower portion 72A is significantly larger than the lock pin 74, precise alignment is not required for the lock pin 74 to align with and enter the lower portion 72A of the pin hole 72. As the operator moves the platform 8 further down, the lock pin 74 moves along the pin hole 72 from the lower portion 72A to the upper portion 72B, where it fits snugly and prevents the parallel arm assembly 20 from rattling and wearing the lock pin 74 and pin hole 72.
The lock pin 74 and lock bracket 70 are made strong enough to support the platform 8 and a plurality of bags 12 or other agricultural product containers. Thus added agricultural products can be carried with the air seeder on the platform 8 or in the storage compartment 60 under the platform 8. When verifying calibration, an operator may wish to dump only one or two bags into a tank and then, seed a corresponding number of acres before adding more bags to finish the field. By carrying more bags along with the air seeder, the operator can verify the calibration, and regardless of his location on the field when this task is completed, simply elevate the platform and dump more bags into the tank.
Similarly when finishing a field with the intention of changing a tank over to a different agricultural product upon completion, the operator will want to have a minimum amount of the present agricultural product left in the tank to clean out. Extra agricultural products can be carried on the platform 8 or storage compartment 60 in case the operator's estimate of the amount required to finish is short, allowing him to simply stop the air seeder and load in enough product to finish the field.
Similarly again, some agricultural products like inoculants begin to lose their effectiveness once the bag containing them is opened. The operator can then carry a few bags of inoculant with the air seeder and add them a few bags at a time to protect the potency of the inoculant should the seeding operation be unexpectedly halted for rain or a mechanical breakdown.
An alternate embodiment of the apparatus 101 of the present invention is illustrated in
The foregoing is considered as illustrative only of the principles of the invention. Further, since numerous changes and modifications will readily occur to those skilled in the art, it is not desired to limit the invention to the exact construction and operation shown and described, and accordingly, all such suitable changes or modifications in structure or operation which may be resorted to are intended to fall within the scope of the claimed invention.
