Niels

Nice feature with the light Alex! I thought this autumn was so easy but not for farmers in Somerset it seems. We keep having rain forecast but nothing happens. All of these drills with tyre packers are lovely in the dry but if they sniff a bit of sticky soil it's end of game! Also the headlands end up a mess and nothing grows, easily accounting for a lower yield across the field. I know the Claydon drill is not perfect but at least it doesn't run with packer wheels. I'd rather put some on when I badly need them, which is nearly never.

Some fantastic displays here! If you'd take a quick look you would think they were real pictures. May I ask to share your secret to us about how you created those furrows? As they look absolutely spot on! Like said earlier on here have not seen something as lifelike before.

Certainly interesting, did you build that?

That would be great!

Ok Alex I didn't knew there was a V1230. Will make life easier when cutting rape also. Looking forward in seeing you convert a Wiking header ). Ref the Claydon drill it requires 50 hp per metre to work comfortably so 12m would require 600 hp which means you need a Challenger 875E or Quadtrac 620 to pull it. One can wonder how much good your doing if you are working in such a way... I am not convinced! Ol: The Claydon and any other drill that only minimally moves the soil will be turning your field a lot stiffer so you get less traffic. Jeff Claydon's trailers are on super singles yet no wheelings in his field whilst he unloads on the move. Equally tractors are not on overly wide rubber. After 13 years of direct drilling the land is very strong, doesn't compact very easily and can carry a lot of weight. Even after a year or two you notice massive differences. You could easily use a 6m drill and cut & cart 12m I think but it needs time to settle. Also the plants on top, whether it is a crop or a cover, will give your soil strength and allow you to drill with minimal wheelings under whet conditions. I'm very curious to see how you get on with the Claydon drill model ). Keep us posted. A friend of mine is building a 4m for himself and for me as I have two left hands.. Hopefully a straw harrow is to follow after that.

The V1200 doesn't actually cut 12m wide so you'd need a V1350 to fit in snugly with a 12m CTF system and still have some room left to manoeuvre.

A big shame to hear the 770 went up in flames Alex. Must have been someone that didn't like Frontier.

Ooh that Versatile is a nice one. Must try and get one of those over to Holland ).

I think you'd be better off waiting a few more years until decent soya bean variety's come about that are earlier to harvest and yield well in our mild climate. Quinoa is being grown in Holland as well as it's a big hype but when everyone does it how will the market react? It's also a very late harvest, like soya beans.

Understandable Alex. Shame you won't be able to use CTF on that side of the farm then. Maybe the market will climb up a few more years and if cereal prices stay low your probably glad you kept them in your cropping. Also a good stubble for a first wheat if you can lift the field cleanly. Ol, well I do conquer onion growing is quite something different! They saying over here is that you have to grow them for at least 10 years. One year they are worth their weight in gold, one year you have to dump them in a ditch and the other 8 are break even. It's a very strange crop but Dutch farmers sell onto the world market (mainly Africa and Asia plus UK also lots) where's the UK growers can sell their produce in their own country. From an agronomy point of view i'd be very careful though unless you have a very good agronomist with good sense. Also kit wise you'll need quite a bit more and I think Alex is looking less machinery rather than more. One option I have often thought of myself in the UK is grow potatoes one year and keep the beds intact with a sort of CTF system for 72" beds and put onions on them the next year. Knowing UK farmers though they'd rather put wheat on it first.

Final year for potatoes or will you have some next year Alex?

Well it has always been like that hasn't it! Look at: CVT transmission, 3 pt linkage, Diesel fuel, Isobus, GPS etc.. etc.. they all do it nothing new. Some things catch on, others don't. Don't forget Deere have been down the track route when the first Quadtrac appeared with the H-Track that was taken on from Stocks in the UK. They had to stop so I heard because of patent infringement.

Claas do well scrambling up their model numbers in recent years. Already caused for confusion and these Tucano's won't help. Maybe they will help push the single rotor machines but still find it odd that Claas sell it. Are they feeling to much pressure from Deere and Case?

That was quick Paul! Nice one. Odd the Tucano 570 and 580 have been launched but only a 570 on the brochure?

Main difference being houses and countryside are not really mixed in Australia and NZ's arable area whereas in the UK (and other country's) it is. I agree it probably is less harmful to nature than it looks but by today's standards it's a no no. Oh and Alex thank you for the reply. What are yields looking like, still good?

Ok that explains it! I thought it was just so your neighbours thought you had the money for a 6 cyl but you really didn't. Makes sense for hedge cutting etc.. I guess. Plenty of 6530 and 6630s round here but never heard of turbo failures. I see JD is remaining a firm favourite of you!

Nice to see something different than a Claas, JD or NH Tractorman!

What variety of awned wheat is that Alex? As Soissons is normally much earlier cut?

I have always been wondering why anyone would want to buy a JD 6534, do you know why Gav?

Are those vans and pick up 1/32nd scale Alex? They seem to be dwarfed by the Lexion 770!

If you want to increase capacity one of these Honey Bee machines might be useful Alex: Get some big swaths and pick them up with the Lesbians! Might even work in cereals if conditions are right. You're losing 25% acreage because of CAP reform or some landlords jumped out? If you replace it with other combineables they will still be busy though. Well if your looking for an assistant farm manager in the future I might consider a move to sunny Somerset.

Good to hear harvest is going well and nice also to read about your real life farm. Would you consider a third combine for next year?

Alex: Once again thanks for sharing thoughts about carpet farming. How wide is the Horsch Tiger, 6m? Paul, shouldn't be to hard putting dust on the models. Most of mine seem to get some over time! If you have a compressor can blow it off? Also a make up brush works wonders, ask your wife I've been wondering about the French nut park also, reminds me of:

You can be chuffed to bits with your Cabernet at 4.26t/ha Alex! From what I hear rape yields in the UK are piss poor virtually everywhere! Crops have looked great but small seed and low yields. If you're going to switch to 12m CTF will you go for a new V1230 header so you gain some overlap? Might as well modify the headers and make it a proper Vario header rather than having to mount a Matrot side knife on the combine . I think in reality you wouldn't put that big Challenger in front of the chaser, uses way to much diesel. But I don't know what gradient some of the fields are. Ref. the previous question about cropping, thanks a lot for the thorough reply! So if I understand correctly if I bring in my farm under management of Oakley I get the profit from what is grown on my land? That is fair enough but if, for example, you cropped my whole farm OSR this year I wouldn't earn a lot of money as prices are poor! Ah well, we must have a good relationship then! Grass for AD seems nice but wouldn't forage rye be better? At least you can use CTF on both if investments are made on the kit. Maize will be more difficult when come harvest also with all the trailers. In true AD fashion they'd probably plant until late and still be foraging in November-December! Wouldn't like that on my land. Have a safe harvest and keep us up to date.

Of course I understand the great benefits block cropping has, especially for a farm like Oakley. I assume all the 8 farms have different owners and for SFP entitlement are seen as separate farms? Hence why all of them need to have three crops, right? If so, another question comes to mind. Say you contract one of my farms and it is block cropped wheat one year, barley another and rape another. Will I only get the profits from that one crop? If you put 3 crops on my farm and it's a particular poor wheat year the other crops might make up for it but not if the whole farm happened to be wheat? How is dividend paid to your land owners then? If It is all thrown into one big basket (8 farms into one) you have a more mixed result but if one of the 8 farms is poor land the yield there will be lower and the profit is decreased whilst my land actually made a good profit? The good suffer from the bad in that case. Anyway, back to the 3 crop rule (much talked about but nobody really knows how it will go). You don't have to crop 5 percent of course that is just the minimum. However, it might be viable to approach it from another point. Your going to CTF which means not fiddling about in small corners. When I worked on a farm in Suffolk we drilled all the corners, patches and stuff down hedgerows/trees with grass. These give the poorest yield and also helped making fields a little more square. A small advantage is that you can drive around fields with the pickup/quadbike and actually see what the crop is like down the bottom end. If you would drill grass margins on your farms would you reach the minimum 5%? If we move to robot technology in the future you can run multiple small machines/units Alex and farming smaller blocks of land won't be as much of an issue.