Driving Farm Productivity: Gas-Powered Post Driver

Feb 09, 2024
By Farms.com

Photo Credit: Skidril

Driving posts for fences when you can’t use a bigger piece of equipment

By Braxten Breen
Farms.com Intern

Sometimes you can’t use a larger piece of equipment to drill a post on the farm. That is when the Skidril post driver can come in handy.

Depending on the circumstances, driving posts manually can be physically demanding and challenging to a farmer. Soil conditions, post material and size, post depth, physical strength all come into play when installing a series of posts for the farm.

Skidril has a tool for you, the G15D is a 4-cycle gas powered post driver that puts an end to manually post driving.

Gas powered post drivers originated with Skidril, with a series of post drivers, the G15D is easy on-off simplicity, powerful light weight driver with no hoses attached.

Weighing in at 33lbs, the G15D driver runs at an impact energy of 35 ft-lbs. being a 1.5 hp with max speed of 600 rpms, while remaining at a high fuel efficiency of 1qt/hr.

The G15D driver has an air cushion dampening for no recoil, with few moving parts already, there is no need for springs or extra parts.

The G15D from Skidril is a cool tool for drilling post holes when you can use a larger piece of equipment. Watch the video below to see how easy the Skidril G15D is to use.

Video: Western Canadian Agriculture: Hard Times Made the World's Best Farmers

Western Canadian agriculture produced the most advanced farmers in the world not through abundance but through adversity. The crow rate fell. The wheat price went nowhere. The brown envelopes stopped.

When the subsidies disappeared, the bad farmers left and the good ones stayed. And the ones who stayed could not just grow wheat anymore. They started growing lentils and canola and peas and flax and faba beans. They built crop rotation. They got serious about agronomy because there was no government backstop. That process produced the Western Canadian agriculture Dennis Bulani describes in this clip: the most advanced, most educated farming culture in the world.

His contrast with Iowa corn and soybean farmers is sharp. At a DeKalb farmer meeting in Okoboji, Iowa, he asked what crop rotation they ran. Beans on corn stubble, corn on bean stubble. How do you fertilize? The co-op agronomist handles it. Have you considered other crops? No need. We make so much money on corn and soybeans. Western Canadian agriculture was never allowed that comfort. And now those Iowa farmers are watching soybean markets lock up with China and corn prices slide, and they do not have the agronomy knowledge or the research base to pivot. Western Canadian farmers adapted on a dime because they had done it before.

Dennis also makes the case that Western Canadian agriculture keeps adapting in real time. Low commodity prices over the past year have pushed growers to look seriously at precision spot-spray technology. He knows a neighbor who bought a sprayer with the seeing-eye system and sprayed only 80 out of 320 acres. As a chemical retailer Dennis acknowledges that will affect his sales. He supports it anyway, because if it advances Canadian agriculture and makes farmers money, that is a good outcome.

The lesson Dennis draws from the tale of two farms: continuous improvement is the only durable strategy. When canola was $22 a bushel some growers went to Arizona instead of the Crop Production Show. When the price came down those same growers came back to the research and the discipline. Products do not go on Rack Petroleum's shelves unless they pass a replicated trial first. That is what Western Canadian agriculture built through hard times: farmers who do the work whether the times demand it or not.

Dennis Bulani is CEO of Rack Petroleum and Ultimate Yield in Biggar, Saskatchewan. Dan Aberhart hosts GTF Productions, Western Canadian Agriculture's foremost live briefing platform and its foremost AI training platform for ag operators