Assiniboia inventor helps farmers around the world recover damaged crops

Dave Dietrich is a generational Saskatchewan farmer who turned a struggle to pick up his damaged pulse crops into an international business supplying farmers globally with the means to recover their damaged crops, turning losses into gains.

“It really started because of my own farm,” Dietrich explained to MooseJawToday.com. “I had seeded milestone lentils … milestone lentils are small, but very good yielders. I figured I had about 40 bushels to the acre.”

However, when Dietrich drove out to harvest his crop, his combine came up mostly empty.

“When a heavy stand of lentils or peas develops and you get rains in a timely fashion, the pods become heavier. And if you get a shower of rain or even fog or heavy dews, that adds to the weight of the plant. Pretty soon it gets tired and it starts falling over …

“Milestone lentils probably grow about nine inches tall, that’s their normal height — nine, maybe ten inches tall. But as they fall over, it’s more like trying to pick up a newspaper or a piece of cardboard lying close to the ground.”

And that’s how Dietrich started, because he couldn’t find crop lifters that went close enough to the ground to recover his flattened pulse crops.