Meridian Source Photo
GO Technologies Agriculture Solutions is helping farmers by taking the grain drying industry by storm with two new locally-designed products that are now hitting the international market.
Located at 5314 48 Ave. in Kitscoty, GO Tech originally started out as Go Technologies Ltd. and was an oilfield vent gas conservation company, but after rebranding in 2016, the company got more involved in grain dying units that are currently putting them on the map.
“Back in 2016, we were starting to get some tough combining conditions. We wanted to fix this problem, so we put our heads together to see if we could come up with a way to add supplemental heat to our bins to help dry the grain better than if we were just using fans,” said GO Tech’s VP of sales Scott Pratt.
“What was out on the market at the time was basically a construction heater hooked up to a fan. The problem with those is you have combustion gases and combustion moisture going into your product; it was also a pretty inefficient way of drying.”
The first product to come out of the newly-branded company was the ThunderDryer, an efficient heat exchange system that isolates combustion gases and exhaust.
“In 2017 we sold to about 25 local producers from around the area and the feedback was great,” said Pratt. “When 2018/2019 hit we got into our wet years, so we refined the design and we now have close to 150 being used in the local area.
“We also took it one step further and put it on a trailer, making it portable so guys could move it from bin to bin.”
The second product to come out of the design shop was the Air Missile system, which was designed to solve the problem of moisture caps forming at the top of bins using in-bin aeration to dry grain.
“This product is going to be a game-changer,” said Pratt.
“When you’re drying grain, the fan is at the bottom of the bin and pushes that moisture and air up. There’s a lot of variables that factor into this, but you could have thousands of pounds of water that have to be removed. As you’re pushing that air up, a lot of times you can stall out, and this happens when you get halfway up the bin and there’s so much moisture up top that the fan doesn’t have enough pressure to keep pushing that air out.
“What ends up happening is you over-dry the bottom grain and you really saturate the top. There’s really nothing that ever made it to that top portion of the bin where all that stall out happens, so we came up with the missile system.”
Last September the company partnered with Thunderstruck Ag Equipment out of Winkler, Man. and since that partnership, the sky seems to be the limit.
“Thunderstruck is now basically our whole distribution system for marketing and sales,” said Pratt. “Now they’re pushing the units out to Ontario, into Nebraska, Indiana, those corn-belt states that always have moisture and always seem to have an issue with it.
“Thunderstruck is now really running with it and plans to take it over to Europe, Australia and further out. Now that we have the backing and the data to back our system.”
GO Tech was also recently at Canada’s Farm Show in Regina and was up for innovation awards for their dryer and air missile system.
“With them not having a show for the past two years, they had over 35 innovators in there, so it was a pretty cool group to be a part of.
“We didn’t end up winning the innovation award,” he said, adding the fact it was an honour to simply be up for awards against such strong competition.”
GO Tech was also up for an award at Agri-Trade in Red Deer.
