Hot new invention basis of Beechy business

Save time and money; protect health and the environment. Those ideas inspired an invention, and that invention, in turn, has created a manufacturing business in Beechy, Sask., with sales across Western Canada and some American states.

“Some people say it’s just another toy,” said inventor, Dale Wiens, a Beechy-district producer for more than 35 years, and president of SprayTest Controls Inc. “But our customers claim the device is so user-friendly and convenient that they don’t know how they did without it.”

The device is a remote boom-control that tests sprayer nozzles on agricultural chemical sprayers. The remote boom-control also reduces the producer’s exposure to chemical, and prevents wasting chemical.

Wiens’ ingenuity won a Farm Progress Show Outstanding New Inventions Award in 2002 and an accolade as one of “Canada’s Top 10 Hot Technologies for 2002” from the Canadian Association of Agri-Retailers in December 2002.

“Farms and sprayers are getting bigger,” Wiens said. “It used to be that spraying season lasted two weeks, but now we’re spraying from mid-April to the end of October because of bugs in canola, midge in wheat, and grasshoppers. And I can’t run and climb as fast as I used to. So, I thought there had to be a better way for checking nozzles than having to flip the switches on in the cab, and jumping out and running around the back to see what was happening.”

Wiens says time is precious during spraying seasons: timeliness is everything.

“I don’t want to be fixing when the wind isn’t blowing. What I’m saying is that if a nozzle is plugged on a sprayer, the farmer has to turn everything on in the cab, run around the sprayer for 90 to 130 feet; figure out which nozzle is plugged; make mental notes; run and turn the switches off; then run back and take the nozzle apart; clean and service it; then run and turn everything on in the cab again, and run back 90 to 130 feet to test to make sure the right nozzle was cleaned.”

This exercise can be repeated many times during the course of finding a plugged nozzle on a sprayer, says Wiens.

“And then there’s the hurrying and the safety considerations – rushing and climbing in and out of the cabs and banging one’s shins.”

More Success Stories