AUSTRALIAN farm machinery guru, Dr Graeme Quick, is widely known to many of our readers for his 10 farm machinery books.
One of them, The Grain Harvesters, has sold over 40,000 copies and is in its seventh edition.
But it's the story behind this well-travelled farm machinery engineer and author that's equally fascinating, as I found out recently during an on-farm interview.
In addition to his books, we've all read many of his 100 other farm machinery publications - and recently his glossy hardbound book, International Harvester Tractors and Equipment in Australia and New Zealand (Rosenberg, 2009), came off the press.
It’s a beautifully-illustrated document for the benefit of ‘red’ machinery devotees.
“Technical writing has been a fascinating part of my career,” Graeme said.
“I’ve always wanted to get as much as I could down on paper - as a service to humanity.”
Just when most people plan retirement, in 1997 Graeme and his wife Marlene were called back to work again, back to Iowa State University, USA, where he was asked to lead the university’s farm machinery program at the engineering faculty.
“Iowa is the centre of the universe as far as farm machinery is concerned,” Graeme explained.
“That state has no great tourist attractions but it does have some 200 farm machinery manufacturers, including five John Deere factories, so I was in my element.”
A string of industry accolades, including being made a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers (ASAE), a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia, and a gold medal along the way, demonstrate the esteem with which he is held by his peers.
Today, Graeme and Marlene are back in Australia, living on a small farm in south-east Queensland that keeps them active.
And he is still active in the profession that gave him that original brief to travel the world to further the cause of engineering for agriculture.
That old adage ‘join the navy and see the world’ could easily apply to Graeme Quick, as his family criss-crossed the globe on the coat-tails of one of this country’s most respected farm machinery experts.
It began with Graeme’s upbringing on his uncle’s farm near Geelong, Victoria, where, when he helped his uncle stoke sheaves he marvelled at a reaper and binder and at a single cylinder engine “chugging away,” driving a sawbench.
“I became utterly fascinated by machinery mechanisms, and their sheer ingenuity,” he said.
Many, many years later there is still that same spark of interest in a chosen profession that has seen him work in more than 30 countries around the globe.
Talking to me at his Peachester property, Graeme vividly remembers past events, especially in the light of racking up some noteworthy machinery milestones over the years.
He was educated in Geelong then went on to Melbourne Uni for his first degree - in mechanical engineering - paying for his education by working on a range of farms where he graduated from horse-drawn to tractor-drawn equipment.
It was while the operator on a Sunshine AL harvester drawn by a Nuffield tractor that he took out a pencil to scribble on the side of the grain bin just how much time had been lost due to breakdowns.
“Incredibly, it was only working about 30 percent of its time in the paddock,” he said.
“That’s where I learned about the field efficiency of farm machinery.”
Becoming the first lecturer in agricultural engineering to be called that in Victoria, this man-on-the-move who later sought post-graduate qualifications in this country managed to hurdle this country’s bureaucracy by securing a post at Iowa State University in the United States.
“It took us six months to sell everything here and burn our boats,” Graeme recalled.
His loyal wife Marlene, plus their three boys then 4, 5 and 7-years-old, took “the big jump” to live in America in 1967.
Teaching and advancing his career in farm machinery engineering saw Graeme obtain a PhD before moving to Norway where he worked on research plot equipment.
On completing that contract, and with nothing satisfactory opening up in Australia, he was snapped up by the White Farm Equipment company in Ontario, Canada, who wanted his grain harvesting expertise.
While there, he participated in the design and commercial launch of White’s Harvest Boss 9700 - the rotary-type combine harvester that had the highest capacity performance at the time. He also came up with a few patented inventions, like bolt-on and Kwik-cut knife sections, concepts that are still in use today.
Eventually, Australia lured him back, courtesy of a CSIRO post during the mid-70s.
While with CSIRO, he instigated the design of Australia’s first rotary-type combine harvester.
“I managed to attract the interest of Toowoomba-based Walsh Engineering and they built several tractor-drawn prototypes,” Graeme said.
Sadly, the project fizzled out with the rural downturn of the 80s and the shift to imported self-propelled headers.
That period also saw the last serial production of Australian farm machinery.
His life took another unexpected turn when he was hired to lead the engineering program of the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines.
During a seven year stint in Asia, he was in communication with famed English machinery researcher Wilf Klinner at the Silsoe Institute in Bedfordshire.
The outcome was a British-funded project to design and launch small-scale stripper-harvesters in Asian rice fields.
Oh, and he found time to carry out work-related duties in places as far afield as Egypt, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam and even Bhutan in the Himalayas, to name a few of the countries he worked in for the institute, and for the UN.
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