Frank no longer needs to remove solids from his dairy effluent

Running a feedpad, and separating out the solids was a time consuming daily process, and Frank was looking to maximise efficiency and cut down costs, so he contacted Nevada.  Now with a 6m litre pond, TurboStir^™ 7000 PTO stirrer and electric pump, he wouldn’t look back.

‘We’ve got a sheep/beef farm mainly trading in lambs and we’ve had a feed pad that we used to feed angus cattle on, and we’ve since changed that and we are now wintering up to 400 cows for approximately 13-14 weeks on a concrete pad. Before that we used to separate out the solids out with a solids separator. It took a long time so we decided we wanted to put a big effluent pond in, 6 million litres, and be able to pump straight into there. Buying the Nevada pond stirrer has enabled us to do that, and then we can pump all the effluent out. We found the separator high maintenance, extra work and it didn’t get the best results from the effluent.’ Frank said

What made Frank choose Nevada?

‘I rang Nevada with a severe crust problem. Nevada wanted to put a stirrer to the test, and it cleaned the pond perfectly. I had my doubts before they came as to whether it would do it. It was a breeze. It’s less time consuming. The separators took a long time to process, we were scraping out every day, and collecting all the effluent, so it was costing money that way. It’s [effluent] much easier to deal with. Now we can just put it straight into the pond, and we don’t have to worry about it until we pump it out to spread at the other end.’

Frank has noticed some improvements since having the TurboStir^™ 7000.

‘This year we’ve only done a little bit of pumping, but before that we would have had to pump for 3 or 4 weeks for maize and barley.’

‘We’ve got a 7m one [pond stirrer] which is great. I wouldn’t go any shorter than that when you’ve got a reasonable sized pond. I think it’s a good way of doing it, taking the solids out is unnecessary. This seems to be working well.’ Frank Collier – Dairy Farmer, Ohakea