A homegrown innovation has arrived to make farmers' lives easier and safer when changing wheel track widths on their tractors.
Multitrakpro was designed and manufactured by Rowena, NSW, farmer Martin Hallman.
Mr Hallman is no stranger to the task of adjusting wheel track widths as his operation is configured for row cropping at two metres and broadacre farming at three metres.
Like many farmers, adjusting wheel track widths was a process he dreaded.
Mr Hallman said when farmers were making this change, they would jack up the back of the tractor and take both wheels off, leaving the tractor there with no other support.
Taper locks were then adjusted, wheels were swapped over to keep tread patterns facing in the right direction, and then the whole process had to be repeated.
Maneuvring tyres that can sometimes weigh up to half a tonne also added to the difficulty of the task.
Mr Hallman said this process would take roughly half a day with two people.
With Multitrakpro, this process now takes Mr Hallman just 40 minutes on his own.
The commercially-engineered and patented steel hub extends the tractor axles to the desired length but maintains the original bolt design.
Once the hub is fitted, the wheels remain on the extended axle and slide in and out as required.
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Mr Hallman has spent almost 30 years working in the film industry, where safety is often top of mind.
He said the safety improvement the Multitrakpro system provides was massive.
"I always used to look at the old process and go, if I got a safety officer to look at that process, his safety factor scale would be quite high and he would have potential injury, there would then be permanent injury and he would probably put death in it as well," he said.
"Now if you want a wheel back to two metres, you basically undo those 10 studs, push that wheel into two metres, put those studs back in, then come and do the same on the other side.
"So you only ever have to jack one side up, just enough to get the wheel off the ground, so that at any point those wheels can support the tractor."
Like many innovators, it has been a long road to market for Mr Hallman.
He said winning the University of New England's Smart Region Incubator had helped him with the process.
"I came up with the idea quite a long time ago and you end up in that situation where because you've created a concept, you have to keep it confidential until you end up in a situation where you are protected," he said.
"It's very difficult to do anything because you don't want to expose the concept. There was a whole period of time where it was patent attorneys and I've got a very good one in Sydney."
Once he had moved through that the next step was manufacturing prototypes.
Mr Hallman has now reached the stage of producing the product and getting it out to the market.
He said the interest he received on the NFS-Ag site at the Aon AgQuip field days at Gunnedah, NSW, this week has been overwhelming.