![]() The business used 65,300 litres of red diesel between 1 and 25 August and buys part of its fuel requirement on a forward-priced basis through Oil NRG, a local supplier based at Stokesley. We’ll probably do the same with a plough and see how they measure up.”Īs well as the combine and rollers, a second 1,000-litre fuel bowser has been bought to service the large arable and contracting operation. ![]() “So we will probably use a mixture of both and we’re going to trial cultivation discs on the drill using genuine on one side and non-genuine on the other. “I’ve priced genuine and non-genuine parts for what we’re likely to need and there’s roughly a 30% difference, with genuine parts costing about £12,000 but it’s a question of whether we risk the non-genuine parts. This is partly to get a handle on costs, partly to look at the options for replacements and partly to avoid having to spend time on this on a one-off basis at peak times. He has also spent a lot of time looking at the overall cost to the business of wearing metal parts for cultivation equipment including two ploughs, a combination drill, conventional drill and three Vaderstad cultivators. In the case of the rollers, it took a few phone calls to establish a £500 saving on the price of the new rollers plus a £900 better sale price for the old kit than was being offered on a trade-in basis, leaving the business £1,400 better off overall compared with a trade-in. Manager Andrew Yarrow is very keen to get the best deal on everything. ![]() “We got a very good price with a 0% finance deal over five years.”Ī pre-harvest review of workload showed that the 6.3m rollers might struggle to cope so a set of 12.3m rollers has been added to the fleet. “Buying wasn’t really in the plan, we were going to hire a combine but when we worked out the cost per acre over five years, the bought one came in at £26.67/acre against hiring at £34.13/acre,” says owner Adam Metcalfe. Other options had been to contract-in spare capacity from neighbouring farms or to hire. This maintains a consistent feed rate by changing ground speed to compensate for variations in the crop. The most recent purchase is a new full spec John Deere C670 combine with GPS steering, yield mapping and Harvest Smart feed rate control. A new combine, rollers and fuel bowser have been bought to improve efficiency and cope with increasing workloads. ![]()
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