It’s been pretty quiet on farm this week allowing some planning for the season ahead. We will plant somewhere between 100 to 150 acres of carrots and parsnips over the next four months so the race is on.

One of the hardest parts in all of the planning is the concurrent harvest of both the crops - that puts a spanner in the works. We don’t carry enough tractors and men to be able to cover harvesting carrots and parsnips all while planting the same crops so it’s going to take some detailed planning to get it all done.

New machinery

Some machine changes are on the horizon also. We have tried to focus on owning the machines and bringing in the tractors on contract to pull them. As we have expanded, we have generally held machines as backups to those that replaced them but I think we are going to have to move some of this gear on as it's filling up the yard while it is depreciating and rusting.

Some of the gear wouldn’t be worth a lot of money and in real terms would contribute little to new machine purchases, but I’m getting sick of looking at it sitting around the yard.

We have decided for the 2015 harvest to go ahead with the build of two tailor made carrot chaser bins that we designed. They will basically act like grain chaser bins shunting over and back to big tractor trailers or bulkers, keeping trailers with super singles and road tyres off the fields. The chasers will have a minimum of 800’s on tandem axles with quite tall wheels.

Often people focus on the width of the wheel as the be-all and end-all but as important is the rolling friction which is greatly reduced by having high diameter tyres. With the bins designed to be very light with a conveyor floor and potato type cross elevator for filling trailers, we expect them to be a game changer for handling carrots and parsnips.

Carrying around 3.5t per 800 wide tyre that is 1.5m tall at very low PSI will be very gentle on ground while giving us a lot of flexibility for forwarding crop into a variety of trailers for transport on the road