Years in the ag industry mean we’ve come across some pretty ingenious people — none more than Ramsey Bros Integrated Technologies Consultant Daven ‘Waxy’ Tomney. We caught up with Waxy to get the rundown on one time he merged some pretty high-tech agricultural equipment for a novel way to whip up a feast.
“I started out in ag by doing a mechanical apprenticeship with Ramsey Bros, before going to work for Topcon for a number of years and am now back with Ramsey’s, where it all began. During that time, I got chance to play with some pretty revolutionary technologies. It was a great chance to have a lot at my fingertips, all these gadgets that inspired me to think about what was possible and to have a little fun.
“Growing up in the country, one of my favourite things has always been a big cook-up, so I started thinking about merging these crazy technologies into it. I’d been pondering the idea for some time when a friend who knew about it hit me up to cater for their wedding in Clare. I was in!” Waxy recalls.
“And so, I set about putting this out-there theory into practice. I was going to cook a 200kg cow on the back of a tractor, using technology to control its speed of rotation on the spit. We made up fire trays to hold the heat source and stoked it up with logs and coals, and then came the tech. Basically, it was a Topcon X20 console coupled with about $30,000 worth of controllers that would normally be used to auto steer a tractor and run a boom spray. I hooked this up to a Bedford gearbox that I’d found under a tree, and used a bit of bore casing as the pole to hold the cow,” Waxy explains.
“The cow was ‘made dead’ by a butcher in Clare, we used a front-end loader to lift it onto the spit and began slow-cooking it over 26 hours. It was a long night and day getting it cooked for the evening wedding meal and it wasn’t something I could leave with anyone else, so I sacrificed sleep and stayed to tend to it all night.
“I’m not used to the weather like they get in Clare and it would’ve been one of the coldest nights I’ve ever experienced — it was like trying to cook a piece of meat in a freezer! We had to keep the fire roaring and while the cow was spinning on the spit, we had to keep turning ourselves around to warm up from the fire so we didn’t freeze either.
“A few hours before the wedding, it was looking good, so I raced back to the hotel to spruce myself up and went back for the main event. I was definitely a little worn in the eye but it was worth it when we started carving off the meat which well and truly fed 120 guests at the wedding who had enjoyed the whole spectacle. There was way more than we needed, so people took home extra to freeze or eat in the coming days, and it was definitely a meal to remember.
“One of the things I love the most about working in ag is that we have so much stuff that has particular purpose. The fun comes from popping a twist on what we do day-to-day and getting a bit of a laugh out of it!”
