June 26th 1999

Buoyant sales for second-hand feeders

Last week, Keenans of Borris held their second annual used Keenan feeder sale. Francis Quigley went along to see what was on offer and talk with farmers who were looking for a good quality second-hand diet feeder.

THE Irish company Keenans has become one of the leading suppliers of diet feeders worldwide.

Selling such a high volume of new machines has its benefits. The downside is that they may find they are overrun with second-hand machines.

This means that they are no longer able to offer as keen a price for a trade-in machine, as they might hope to. A lot of manufacturers will increasingly find this a problem and may be faced with looking for some way of moving on the second-hand units.

Keenans however are not faced with this problem as they have managed to set up a rather interesting selling technique for their second-hand machines. Last year, they held their first ever "Used Keenan" sale.

It turned out to be such a success that they now plan to hold the event every year.

Last week, was the second such sale and Keenans had 32 machines on offer, 29 of which were sold on the day and the remaining three were sold the following morning. All of the feeders have been factory reconditioned.

As Seamus Barron, manager of Keenan Ireland explained each of the machines have been relined inside the drum, to ensure there is a minimum of 6mm of steel in all places. Auger flights are also reconditioned.

The machines are fitted with new chains and sprockets, where necessary and all of the electrics will be fully serviced.

Once all of the reconditioning has been done, the machines are then re-sprayed and new instruction stickers added.

Looking at the machines on sale, it was obvious that all of the work was done to a very high standard. This allows Keenans to give a twelve-month warranty with all of the second-hand machines sold.

There were a wide variety of machines available at the sale. Prices varied from as low as £7,500 right up to £16,000 for an EF 115 machine, which was an ex-demo machine, and looked like new.

Most of the machines on offer were EF100 models, which is the one of the most popular models, which the company has sold, according to Seamus.

Jeff O'Shea from Agricredit was on hand for the day offering farmers advice on finance options. He gave me a breakdown of the cost for a typical machine on offer on the day.

The average price of the machines on sale was around £9,000. Most finance companies will give finance over five years on a Keenan feeder and Agricredit was offering farmers five years credit on the second-hand machines on the day.

So a £9,000 machine over five years, with a total of ten payments (one up front payment and two annual payments from then on), will cost £2,200 per year.

According to Seamus, this amount can be made up in a very short time. Beef farmers on the day who were buying a machine to get into the KK-club, are currently receiving £80/head extra for their beef cattle, he said.

He also claims that each farmer will have a saving of around £40/tonne on feed rations, and he believes that the average farmer buying machines on the day should get around ten years of service from the machine, as most are medium sized operations.

There was a good mix of dairy and beef farmers present for the sale. The average size of dairy farmer purchasing second machines at the sale was 45 50 cows with around 50 cattle. The beef men present were farmers with between 100 to 150 cattle.

Who is buying the feeders?

WE spoke to a number of farmers who bought machines on the day to get some impression of who exactly is buying these high quality second-hand feeders.

Jimmy Cummins runs a dairy and beef farm in Inistigoe in Co. Kilkenny. He purchased a machine at the sale last week. Jimmy milks around 50 cows and he keeps all of the followers to fatten for the factory. He will also buy in a few stores if he finds that he has extra silage.

One of the main reasons why he decided to buy the feeder was to become a member of the KK club.

"Eighty four pence is not a lot of good to us, it is barely enough to pay for the feed, we hope that the feeder will bring down the cost of feed," according to Jimmy.

Jimmy is reasonably well set-up for the feeder with all of the beef animals on slats and a passage of around 15ft wide. Ideally however, he will need to build a second cubicle shed, to keep the dry cows separated from the milking cows.

He currently feeds the cows nuts in the milking parlour and feeds silage with a grab in the passage.

He had considered buying corn from the combine and rolling it however he felt that there would be a lot of extra work involved in rolling the corn and labour may possibly be a problem in the future.

As he is only five miles from New Ross, he said that there should be no problem driving to the boat to get gluten or other cheaper feeds. With the price of making silage so high, he believes that adding straw and other materials through the feeds should all help to reduce the costs.

Pat Breen travelled down from Pallas in Co. Limerick to the sale. Pat has an 80 cow dairy herd and he decided that he needed some way of reducing the amount of time he was tied to feeding the cows.

All of the cows are housed in a shed of 60ft x 80ft and they are all feeding of one side of the house. Pat has been feeding the cows silage with a tractor and grab and feeding meal in the milking parlour. He then leaves them out to feed on brewer's grain in troughs outside the shed.

Pat said that it was becoming more and more of a chore to feed the cows the brewers grain and was tied to the farm almost all day feeding the silage and the brewers grain. "If I wanted to go to the mart or any where I needed to find someone to look after the place and it is becoming very difficult to get good staff."

Pat bought a second tractor in the spring with the intention of getting a diet feeder during the year. With the feeder he hopes to be able to feed all of the animals in one go.