Ag inventors show off their ideas at Technology Show in Billings

One is a cowboy with no engineering background who turned his idea into a machine in order to make a living. The other is a mechanical engineer who wants to pay for his "bad habit" – raising cows.

By JIM GRANSBERY
Of The Gazette Staff

Both were showing off Thursday at the inaugural Ag Technology Show, which runs through Saturday at the Montana Convention Center.

Ken Wolery and Jeremy Dietz have dreamed up machines for making farming and ranching easier. They were grabbing a lot of attention from the early attendees at the trade show, which focuses on new and old technology applicable to the agricultural life.

Unemployed and living in the countryside near Roundup, where weeds blown against fence lines are a familiar sight, Wolery said he was "praying for something to come up."

"Thank the lord for the patience," he said.

Wolery has built what he calls a Fence Sweep. He took street sweeping brushes and put them on a vertical axis that sweeps the weeds away from the fence and into a chopper that sprays the mulch out the back of the machine.

The brushes have long bristles, "so they are friendly with the fence," he said. The machine can also be adjusted to cut sagebrush to clear a path for new fence.

Growing up on a farm near Joplin, and ranching near Roundup, Wolery said he has practiced his father’s axiom with machinery – "You can buy it or build it." Self-taught engineering is what keeps most Montana farms and ranches running, he said.

He built the sweeper three winters ago. The device in not patented, he said, because gaining one is too expensive and really does not protect the idea from minor modification by another builder.

Wolery has no idea what it would cost to manufacture his idea, and the rules of the Ag Inventors Contest prohibit him from talking about it now, he said. The contest has drawn about a dozen entries that include a cordless, electric branding iron, a small buggy to move bales and a device for weighing calves at birth. Visitors to the show will chose the winner by casting ballots.

Wolery has used the sweeper on more than 400 miles of fence line. He rents out the machine or operates it himself when he’s not working construction.

Dietz is a mechanical engineer who has retired into the open space near Ekalaka. It was there in the solitude that he designed a high-pressure, wind-driven water pump. There’s no shortage of wind, and there is always a need to lift water to livestock.

Dietz worked on airplane construction for 30 years before retiring. Originally from the Bloomfield area, he and his wife, Judy, wanted to live where there was not a lot of traffic and where the neighbors weren’t too close. "We’ve been secluded for two years in Ekalaka."

With a mechanical engineering degree from Texas Tech in Lubbock, he spent his career doing stress analysis on aircraft.

"Had to go into engineering to support my bad habit of running cows," Dietz said. "Now I’ve combined the two."

His working prototype of a water pump powered by wind will lift water under pressure at least 400 feet, Dietz said.

While rattling off physics formulas, he describes how the pump works and why.

Dietz said his patent application includes the pump’s use for gas as well as liquid. He has been working on the device for about a year and plans no major adjustments.

What he needs now is data on the efficiency of the pump.

"I need to be able to say it will pump this much water, at this wind speed, at this pressure," Dietz said. "Then I need some marketing research."

The Ag Technology Show continues through Saturday.

Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2003/01/24/build/local/inventors.inc

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Fine-tuning wheat for the noodle market

University News

The brightness and color of a noodle are important to Asian buyers, and breeders have noted that brighter noodles are associated with lower amounts of an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase. What wasn’t known was how polyphenol oxidase or "PPO" might be affecting agronomic factors. So with the funding of the Montana Wheat and Barley Committee, Jack Martin and other wheat breeders at Montana State University set out to test the color and agronomic characteristics of high- and low-PPO wheats.

"The industry dogma was that low-PPO was better because it was associated with a better color profile," says Martin. "But we didn’t know what it did to bread quality or other agronomic traits."

Through a series of lab analyses at MSU as well as field tests of 66 winter wheat breeding lines and six varieties at three sites in 2001 (Bozeman, Conrad and Huntley), Martin showed that the main trade-off of breeding low-PPO into wheat is that it heads about a day later than high-PPO wheats.

"It may not be too serious, but if it delays maturity very much we would be concerned," says Martin.

The biggest benefit of the low-PPO wheat breeding lines is that, as expected, they were associated with the noodles staying brighter for hours after cooking.

"They maintained their color better 24 hours after cooking," says Martin. "That’s important because in some Asian countries, the noodles sit several hours after cooking. They don’t want the noodles going brown while waiting for the customer."

In shades of coloring, noodles should be bright, with any color tendency being toward yellow.

Other researchers involved with Martin’s work include winter wheat breeder Phil Bruckner and cereal quality lab director Deb Habernicht.

Both Bozeman environments had mean yield of tested lines of about 97 bushels per acre while Conrad and Huntley had mean yield less than 14 bushels per acre. The high and low PPO lines did not differ in grain yield. Protein levels were all high for winter wheat (greater-than 12.9%) but exceptionally high at Huntley (17.0%). Lines selected for low PPO tended to have higher protein than those with high PPO for all environments except Huntley. That protein difference was not always consistent. Low PPO lines also tended to be shorter in height and had slightly higher test weight than the high PPO lines, but these differences were within the limits of chance variation.

Selection for high or low PPO did not impact important milling and bread quality traits such as flour yield, bake mixing time, bake water absorption, and loaf volume. Low PPO lines did have higher flour ash content than high PPO lines. Similarly, the low PPO lines were not different from the high PPO lines for noodle textural traits (springiness, cohesiveness, adhesiveness, hardness, and chewiness).

Jack Martin (406) 994-5057

http://www.montana.edu/commserv/csnews/nwview.php?article=704