Kees and Arienne Van Dun have a family business employing 30 full-time workers, varying in age from 18 to 65 along with four additional loader drivers and four office staff.

This Dutch farm contract business uses a fleet of 27 tractors and 28 self-propelled harvesters, operates mainly in farm work while also doing some earth moving and specialist bulb harvesting. It has an annual turnover of just short of €7m.

Kees Van Dun said the challenge for the past five years has been surviving in the farm contracting business and developing the business on the polder lands. The challenges for the next five years will be machinery profitability and succession of the business for himself, his sons and daughter.

Contractors must seek out good paying customers and sometimes discontinue systems that are not profitable

"The season during which machines are being operated is getting shorter, while the cost of the machine is becoming more expensive," said Kees Van Dun. "Farm contractors must continue to be profitable to be successful in business and to attract financial support," he added.

"Contractors must seek out good paying customers and sometimes discontinue systems that are not profitable as well as select new machines and systems that you can make successful yourself, not because neighbouring contractors are doing similar work."

The Van Dun family have been working on the development of a new mobile phone app for their machine drivers so they can complete their job cards/diaries online, with the information fed into the computer system of the contracting business. This aims to bring more efficiency to the invoicing system and help deliver better cashflow. The system is being piloted at present with four drivers.

Contractors play a part in managing soil compaction

Wijnand Sukkel from Wageningen University gave a presentation on the issues around soil compaction for farm contractors. He said heavy summer showers in Holland this year were affecting soil quality. He said poor soil management was the cause of collapse of civilisations in the past. Soils need to be resilient because of climate change, and their management is now more critical, he added.

He said organic matter is crucial to soil structure and we should not be using organic matter for energy as we need it to maintain the soil structure. Contractors should advise their farmer customers to use grass varieties that generate as much organic matter under the soil as above it. Some varieties of grass can deliver 15t of organic matter as a growing crop and an equivalent amount of organic matter in the soil to help maintain soil structure.

Sukkel said the results from more than 20 soil compaction experiments in North America and Europe showed that compaction in the topsoil is related to ground contact pressure only, while compaction in the upper part of the subsoil is related to both ground contact pressure and axle load, and compaction in the lower subsoil is related to axle load only.

The research has shown that soil compaction due to axle loads of 10t to 12t reduced yields approximately 15% in the first year, decreasing to between 3% and 5%, 10 years after compaction. The research suggests that 10% of the yield loss in the first year was due to compaction in the topsoil and upper part of the subsoil.

The effects of topsoil and upper subsoil compaction disappeared in approximately five and 10 years, respectively. Three to five per cent yield loss was apparently due to deep subsoil compaction, which did not disappear during the 12 years of the experiments.

Subsoil compaction permanent

Wijnand Sukkel said lower subsoil compaction is, practically speaking, permanent and should therefore be avoided by all means, whereas topsoil compaction and upper subsoil compaction are temporary and should be limited as much as possible.

Two other important observations were that surface tillage (mouldboard ploughing in most experiments) did not completely alleviate surface compaction and that deep penetration of frost did not alleviate lower subsoil compaction. Avoiding deep subsoil compaction is critical. He said the key to eliminating deep subsoil compaction is to keep axle load low.

He suggested to contractors that they should avoid unfavourable harvesting conditions, use lower tyre pressures or variable tyre pressure systems, use tracked tractors or wider controlled traffic systems, plough on the top rather than in the furrow and consider a transition in mechanisation from big and heavy to light and small machinery, which he said an increasing number of larger manufacturers are now giving serious thought to.

Wijnand Sukkel advised contractors not to ignore soil compaction issues. "Don't always look at the soil, but dig into it and look for the signs of health in terms of organic matter and living organisms," he said.

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