Ontario farmers slash costs with on-farm biomass grain-dryer

Savings of up to 90 % reported

Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum

OTTAWA — There’s no escaping the need to dry grain in Ontario, but a Manitoba company is making it happen by burning biomass like wood chips or corn stover instead of propane and natural gas — and say they are saving customers up to 90 % in drying costs.

Lyall Wiebe, owner and president of Triple Green Products, looks forward this summer to activating only the second ‘BioDryAir’ grain-drying system to be installed in Ontario.

“It’s our biggest unit that we make going into a big grain dryer, and so we’re very excited about that,” Wiebe told Farmers Forum. The 24-million-BTU unit will be incorporated into a grain-drying operation near London, he said.

That particular system will burn wood chips from a local supplier. The chips will be fed via a walking floor hopper — “essentially like a grain trailer with a tarp but without any wheels” — into the combustion chamber where the material will burn at over 2,000°F.

The company has previously installed one other biomass-fuelled grain-dryer in Ontario, a much smaller unit in Southwestern Ontario and fuelled by wood pellets.

Introduced four years ago, the system adapts technology refined for nearly 30 years to dry aggregates in the mining industry and to heat large commercial buildings, greenhouses and hospitals. Triple Green Products — which bought the technology from a long-time operator — is putting additional focus on agriculture. Ranging from the size of a garden shed to a semi-truck, the BionDryAir combustion unit hooks up to a farm’s conventional grain-drying infrastructure and delivers a hot, dry airstream through a huge duct carrying hot vapour directly from the stand-alone biomass combustion chamber located 100 feet or more from the grain bins. There is no heat exchanger; the hot, clean exhaust is used directly and is mixed with fresh air, dropping it to a desired 400°F before percolating through the grain in the typical fashion. It doesn’t use a chimney except during initial warm-up.

As for the conventional gas or propane burners already in place at a grain-drying operation, “we just turn them off,” Wiebe said.

“We’re the only company in the world that can claim to take grain drying off of fossil fuel,” he said.

And yes, the hot exhaust from burning biomass has proven more than clean enough to flow through grain while drying. The tech is so clean, in fact, Australia’s largest cotton gin converted to the system. Wiebe explained that the raw cotton comes out whiter after drying, a tell-tale sign of crucial clean-drying performance in that industry.

The BioDryAir’s appeal lies in its flexibility and efficiency. It can burn almost anything — wood pellets, chips, corn stover, grain screenings, even waste hulls — turning farm byproducts into fuel. “If it burns, we can use it,” Wiebe said.

Unlike propane or natural gas, which carry high moisture content that takes extra energy to evaporate, biomass like dry corn stover (around 12 % moisture at harvest) or wood chips have no such tradeoff.

Cost savings can hit 90 % under the right conditions, depending on the choice of biomass fuel and whether the farm is giving up natural gas or more expensive propane.

Wiebe estimated a return on investment (ROI) as quick as two years and no more than five. “Our bigger systems have a better ROI,” Wiebe explained, “because the savings spread over so many bushels.” Even so, that first smaller system he installed in Ontario, also in the London area, paid off in two years, he said.

One U.S. farmer called his new BioDryAir a “profit centre” and pocketed what he once spent on propane, he added.

Wiebe also pointed out that the system pays for itself, whether or not a carbon tax exists to make propane and gas more expensive, and he advises potential customers to ignore the tax when running their calculations.

The capital cost isn’t cheap. Prices range from “a nice pickup truck” to “a combine,” he said, depending on size and setup. The systems are built to last 30-plus years with minimal maintenance.

“Several” units are now operating in Western Canada, the U.S., and beyond, he said.

Challenges linger with getting growers to make the switch right now, he conceded. Commodity price volatility and tariff uncertainties have some farmers “sitting on their hands,” Wiebe noted. Still, his optimism is unshaken. “Sales breed sales,” he said, predicting a boom once markets stabilize.