Bartok likes U.K. one-man post pounder

I asked Duane Bartok, the Esterhazy, Sask., farmer and inventor who won our trip to Agritechnica in Hannover, Germany, to write a short review of his highlights. The article will appear on page 4 of the January 11 Grainews, but I'm going to give away the surprise right now. Lucky you.

Duane's highlight was an invention by David Carbis, who farms in Cornwall, England. Carbis created a one-man post pounder. Out of all the thousands and thousands of new things displayed at Agritechnica, Duane latched onto a product that isn't even in commercial production. I can see why he liked it.

The pounder attaches to the bucket of a tractor and works off both the loader hydraulics and the rear remotes. You loop the hoses under the tractor and to the front. The pounder holds 30 to 40 posts in a rack. They drop one at a time into the hydraulic pounder, which you position with the bucket controls. As you back to the next post position, the pounder also spools out an appropriate length of fencing wire (or mesh.)

You can't buy one of these pounders just yet. Carbis has patented his invention and is looking for a manufacturer.

Farmers Weekly article

U.K. farm magazine Farmers Weekly had an article on Carbis and his invention in last week's issue. The photos are also from Farmers Weekly.

I've included a few paragraphs from near the beginning of Mick Roberts' article.These paragraph explain why Carbis decided to create his invention. I think many of you will relate to this experience.

...

Mr Carbis, who farms with wife Pam at their 100ha (250-acre) Trenona Farm at Ruan High Lanes, Cornwall, usually works on his own. So when it comes to fencing he has, in the past, had to overcome the difficulties of accomplishing alone what is essentially a two-man task.

“I started by putting the posts in by hand with a sledge hammer, which was slow and exhausting work. Then I borrowed a manual post basher, which was even worse,” he explains. “After I got fed up with that I used a contractor who operated a post knocker on the tractor while I placed and held the stakes in position.”

He soon realised this wasn’t the answer either. He was not only paying for extra labour, but it remained a laborious job. David also admits to cutting corners to speed up the work by operating the post basher’s valve with one hand while holding the stake in place with the other. “I knew this wasn’t the safest thing to do, but securing the stake with the chains on the post basher just took too long,” he confesses.

He thought there had to be an easier, safer and better way and set himself the task of designing something to do the job. In common with all great inventions the result is a machine that carries out a highly complex series of operations using very simple mechanisms. The really ingenious part of the design is how David uses a combination of gravity, hydraulics and simple trip mechanisms to run the machine, which takes less than a minute to knock in a post.