Farmer Jeff Penner finds it frustrating to see large volumes of water seething and flowing into a deep drainage ditch. Some farmers like the look and sound, but not Penner. All he sees and hears is soil erosion—tons and tons, inch by inch, cubic yard by cubic yard of topsoil being removed from fields and deposited miles away. To provide farmers with a viable solution to the persistent problem of water erosion, Penner devised a drainage ditch in which the outlet is dry. There will be no flood flowing into the municipal ditch or into neighboring fields.
“We're making a wide, hidden, shallow ditch that winds around the field, crawling lazily from pothole to pothole, gradually descending to the edge,” Penner said. “When water crosses a drier area, it soaks up. Water that might otherwise cause problems downstream remains. It's almost like a terrace to slow down the flow of water."
However, turning this radical vision into reality first required a significant amount of manufacturing time in his workshop, because he needed some new concept for a scraper—some arrangement of blades and hydraulic cylinders capable of performing complex soil-moving operations. The prototype of the 32-foot V-Wing drainage machine was tested by the inventor in the field.
Automatic Tilt Control (ASC) technology is particularly important in making his slow flow concept a reality. Rather than being tied down to a straight ditch, ASC keeps the blades at the correct depth of cut as the operator zigzags from pothole to pothole towards their final destination, which is the edge of the field. This creates a uniform slope along the entire length of the ditch, hence the depressions. ASC uses tilt sensors that send messages to a monitor that sends messages to the hydraulic valves that control the blades.
“Some people think that we create earthen dams at the edges that slow down the flow of water, but this is not so. Our wings are more like grader blades. They are hydraulically controlled to work in all directions and angles. You can move left, all right, V plow, or any combination in between. So you keep separating the soil from the ditch, smoothing it out to keep the edge even."
Penner admits that the V-Wing is difficult to operate. It does ditching, windrowing, sorting, mud hauling and scraping work. He sets the controls on the wings so that the operator can set them to a one or two degree slope, and the controller will automatically maintain this slope on the sides of the ditch. Gentle side slopes do not damage seeding, spraying or harvesting equipment. In most soil conditions, the V-Wing 3200 HD can cut four inches deep at five miles per hour. pulled by a tractor with a capacity of 450 horsepower. The smaller 2100 HD needs 300 hp. to make a four-inch cut at that speed. In field testing, the 2100HD can cut and finish a half-mile-long, 40-foot-wide flat-bottomed ditch in 30 minutes. After creating the main drain and pushing the soil up the edges, the V-Wing returns to make one pass along each edge, wrapping around the soil and pulling it away from the ditch.