When the weather gives you lemons, make lemonade. That's the outlook Tom McMillan of Pickardville, Alta. kept in mind last year when a snowfall conspired to keep him from harvesting his crops.

"We still had 500 acres of canola and 1,000 acres of barley on the ground and the swaths were covered in a couple of inches of snow," he says. "The idea of creating a snow blower came to us out of desperation. It made all the difference."

McMillan removed the header from his 2950 MacDon swather. On the left lifting arm, he used scrap iron to mount the blower and pulleys he took off an auger-mounted grainvac attachment. He used a section of steel hose taken from another old grainvac for the blower hose. The system used the swather's knife drive PTO to power the blower, and since it rode on the lifting arm, he could control the height.

It took McMillan two and a half days to assemble his blower. Then he drove alongside the canola swaths at six miles per hour to blow the snow off. The combine followed behind, and back at the yard, he ran the canola through his dryer.

It worked well, but he was only able to get over 50 acres before the weather changed again, thawing and then freezing the moisture into ice on the swaths. At this point, the blower was no longer useful, so after combining, he had to screen the ice out with his rotary grain cleaner, screener, and then dry the canola twice before storing it.

McMillan says he also found the unusual snow blower useful for "sweeping up" the final remnants of barley that had temporarily been stored on the ground. "It did a better job than anyone with a shovel or broom could have done."

Before harvest began this year, McMillan converted his blower back into a swather. It took only about 10 minutes.