A22—Lancaster Farming, Saturday, May 2,198^1
Turf farmer launches ‘Generation One 9
BY JOYCE BUPP
Staff Correspondent
POOLESVILLE, Md. - An
ungainly looking structure, it sits
alone in a clearing on a bluff above
the Potomac River Valley, sun
shine glinting off the shiny black
angular shaping.
This strange space-age-looking
building is a solar hay dryer.
Farmer-engineer Frank Wilmot
calls his poured concrete cham
bers and solar collector design
“Generation One,” the prototype
of a baled hay drying system,
originally contrived to counter
foggy river-bottom mornings and
humid, thundershower prone af
ternoons.
WUmot manages the Potomac
Valley “river” farm branch of his
family’s Summit Hall Turf Farm,
Inc. Summit Hall is known as the
first turf farm in America. It was
founded in the 1940’s at the town of
Gaithersburg, twenty miles
downstream on the Potomac, by
Frank's father, William Wilmot,
and has been a pioneering
operation in innovative turf farm
management and mechanization.
“Six years ago, I didn’t even
know what an alfalfa plant looked
like,” grins Wilmot, a mechanical
engineering graduate of Duke
University who chose to return
home to the turf farm to learn the
business.
Actually, alfalfa is but a sideline
to Summit Hall’s bluegrass turf
cropping. The leafy forage plant is
used as a “fertilizer” to the turf,
adding nitrogen to the soils. In
fact, except for a quick chemical
fertilizer finish sometimes given to
the turf just before harvest, alfalfa
is the only nutrient booster the
lawn grass receives.
Since the hundred acres of lush
alfalfa was there, for the making
Wilmot figured he’d try to make
the very best quality hay possible,
aiming for top prices paid at area
hay auctions and looking toward
the discerning taste of running
horses at the East’s abundant
racetracks.
But the 400 plate-flat acres in
turf he adjacent to the Potomac
River, across the histone stream
from Dulles National Airport. The
sharp hills that jut up from the
river valley add to the scenic
isolation of the farm, but hold in
the abundant moisture that settles
over the river. Even thin windrows
of tender young alfalfa never dry
rapidly enough to preserve the
color and nutrient value of
Wilraot’s satisfaction.
“We didn’t know anything about
making hay. After the first year,
we began to realize just how tough
it is to make hay under humid
conditions,” he relates.
Wilmot saw (hying as an obvious
answer, but the last thing he
Wire probes monitor the heart of the solar drying chambers
for Wilmot’s readout on hay moisture during the drydown
process.
wanted to use was an expensive
fossil-fueled system.
In their second year of hay
production, the Wilmot’s set up an
imported English “Thunderbox”
drying system. Bales were stacked
with an air duct through the length,
and a large fan pulled air from out
of the steak.
The following year, a similar
center-duct system was tried,
using a fan that instead blew air
through the stack. After four
weeks of dry-down, the hay wasn’t
wet, but it was somewhat musty.
Wilmot wasn’t happy with the
results.
Late last Spring, with thoughts of
another humid hay-drying season
ahead, Frank turned his
frustration with less than perfect
hay toward the construction of his
self-styled hay dryei.
Wilmot’s solar plant utilizes a
suspended plate collector system,
attached at an angle to the front of
the poured concrete shell enclosing
four separate drying chambers.
Air enters the solar ducts at the
ground level. About an inch of air
space is both above and below the
black corrugated tin roofing-type
metal heat absorption material.
The outside is a clear rigid
fiberglass-type material. Air flows
through the collector ducts and
then into a booster heat absorption
area that utilizes the upper level
and attic roof of the front of the
structure. Each drying chamber
pulls solar heat from a collector
area of about 330 square feet.
Fans installed in the attic of each
chamber draw the heated air from
the collector and force it down
through the stacked bales, (cut
side of the bales stacked upward).
Air flows out of the chamber
through the bottom layer of bales,
through a steel mesh floor and
exits through vents in the false
bottom of the poured concrete
structure.
On a bright sunny summer day,
Wilmot gets a 20-degree tem
perature rise in the air as it passes
through the solar collector. He’s
considering attaching another 16
feet extension of collector area
along the ground to the unit that
would raise the temperature about
another ten degrees, possibly
cutting drying time by one sixth to
one quarter.
Wilmot also did some ex
perimenting with nighttime
drying, using wood as a heat
source, and gained a ten degree
rise in air temperature. That at
tempt, he emphasizes, was strictly
a spur-of-the-moment trial and not
efficient at all.
Wilmot aims at baling hay at 28
percent moisture for the dryer,
cutting the alfalfa one morning and
harvesting it the following day.
Thirty-percent moisture is the
A solar hay dryer first
.eneration Oni is the name farmer- angled, suspended plate collector, flows
engineer Frank Wilmot gives his prototype upward over the front and attic portion of the
solar hay dryer, engineered for the family’s structure and is forced downward by fans
turf farm hay cropping sideline. Air enters located in the attic.
Wilmot's dryer at the ground level of the
* ‘
xit'
~ 4 '?-
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Hay bales ai comi .ies jse box next to the chamber doors)rmeasures
can be stacked for solar drying in four separate the air flow as it passes through the chamber
chambers, 11 feet square by 14 feet deep, stacked full of bales for drying.
Wilmot’s homemade monometer, (looks like a
absolute cutoff point, with hay
baled over that level usually
finishing with some mustiness and
mold.
Each 11-feet-square by 14-feet
deep chamber can accommodate
up to 288 bales when stacked full.
Hay baled at the 28 percent
moisture level, though, is dried
with the chamber filled only partly
to capacity, up to 180 bales. It will
take about two weeks to dry a
partially-full chamber of 28-
percent hay down to the ideal of
ten-percent moisture.
Hay, drier from the windrow,
(perhaps at 24 percent moisture),
gets packed to the top of the
chamber and will dry down to the
ten-percent level in four or five
days.
“We’re so humid here you can
field cure hay to where you want it,
and then it will still soften up in the
barn from absorbing our abundant
air moisture,” laments Wilmot.
“So I overdry bales to ten percent,
and then they pick up three or four
percent moisture sitting in regular
barn storage.”
Success of the operation, like all
hay cropping, depends on the
fickleness of the weather. Frank
keeps one ear tuned to radio and
television weather forecasts, and
hay only goes down if forecasters
are calling for less than 60 percent
chance of showers.
Only enough hay is mowed at one
time to fill dryer needs. And one
chamber is filled to the proper
capapcity before another chamber
is started.
Bales on the top of the stack in
the chamber dry down first of
course. But Wilmot explains the
drier a bale becomes, the more
slowly the remaining moisture is
removed. Thus, the top of a stack
doesn’t become tinder-dry while
stems on the bottom layer are still
flexible.
A wire probe sensor system is
installed through the poured
concrete walls into each chamber
so the moisture content of the hay
being dried can be checked with a
meter.
Wilmot also built a monometer
for each chamber, a simple
measuring guage that reads the
pressure of the air above the bale
stack. That pressure moves a
small portion of water in a curved
plastic hose and the water rises or
falls in the hose.
The level of the water is checked
against a guage behind the hose,
and is compared to commercial
charts calibrated for the fans in
stalled in the dryer. The
monometer reading, based on the
fan charts, tells the cubic feet per
minute of air flow passing through
the chamber.
In February, Wilmot took
samples of his solar unit dried hay
to the York County Forage Day for
testing on Penn State’s infrared
spectre computer. He topped all
other forage samples with a
protein level readout of 22 percent.
Three truckloads of the solar
dried hay have sold recently
through the. Frederick'Hay Auc
tion. Each time, the hay from
Generation One topped the
auction, selling upwards to $2OO
per ton.
Convinced that dried hay will be
the most economical" livestock
protein feed of the future, Wilmot
speculates alfalfa prices can only
continue to climb. And because of
the continuing cost and potential
shortages of fossil fuels, he’s also
sold on the idea of solar drying not
just hay, but all field crops.
To further test Generation One
on other commodities, Wilhiot is
planting com for the first time this
year and plans to batch dry shelled
com, 600 or 800 bushels in a
chamber, to see what the solar unit
can do for a grain crop.
He’s applied twice in the past to
the U.S. Department of Energy for
research grants, but DOE has
turned down the applications both
times. Undaunted, Wilmot is again
looking toward possible grants
from other government energy
programs.
“Because this is a prototype, a
first, we overdesigned and cut no
comers,” says Wilmot.
The concrete walls, for instance,
are six inches thick on the outside
structure, and inside dividers are 4
inches thick. Wilmot said he
believes similar units could be
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