Logistics and Efficiency of Grain Harvest and Transport Systems in a South Australian Context

As grain production becomes more vital and the constraints of climate change grip tighter on the farming systems worldwide, the improvement of efficiencies, the reduction of costs and the optimum allocation of resources is becoming even more important to the farmer. Australia has many unique grain growing areas, where production is carried out under very marginal growing conditions and it is often the scale of farms that makes them profitable. A discrete event simulation was built upon the data collected during field trials to model some typical southern Australian harvesting systems and was compared to actual data collected in the field during harvesting. Simulation parameters included: combine size, operating speed, turning time, unloading time and overall work rate efficiency. Field shape, size and location of temporary storage (field bins) along with the travel distance to the grain silo where recorded and monitored and investigated in a case study. The model was able to optimize the harvest pattern, the number and location of field bins and the number of road transport trucks to best match the harvester and grain transport. Example benefits for a 5000 ha wheat farm included a reduction of 9.5% in harvesting time and a fuel saving of 2100 kg (equivalent to 5.8 t.year -1 reduction in CO2 emissions). The validated model will form part of a decision support tool that farmers can use to optimize their investment patterns for the complete harvest system. This tool aims to minimise production costs, maximise harvested yield and cropping income, in a strategy to reduce farming risks and improve sustainability.