Last year I worked out that our depreciation was £100 / acre. Add in fuel, servicing, insurance and wages for my one employee etc. and the machinery charge becomes well over £200/acre. I can’t bring myself to do it but I am sure the prudent thing to do would be to ask a contractor to do the lot? That is without the opportunity cost of my own time.
Combine and tractor replacement policy
- Thread starter ace
- Start date
Agreed! Our 20 year old Challengers (which featured in a Classic tractor mag article) chug along while the new half track that is supposed to replace one of them spent weeks back at the dealer with a software problem.
I fear that's optimistic. I would guess 4 hect / hr or 36-40 hect per day is normal for our 770 allowing for one move per day, variable field sizes but averaging 20 hect.
Can I ask how many seasons it takes to get to 3,000 drum hours? The combine is one bit of kit I worry about running at high hours. The same applies for the sprayer.
I view one hour on the combine like two on a tractor - ie half the life expectancy - if a tractor has seen it's best years by 10,000hrs, then for a combine its 5000.
It's more down to tinwork wearing out and leaking grain for me than mechanical worries. My neighbour's combine has 6000hrs on the engine, highest I know of.
Hydro sprayers are a pita when they get older - there is a case for replacing every hydraulic pipe on the blimmin things at 5000hrs. Rarely a problem on a trailed machine.
- Location
- south norfolk
Metal fatigue will be the downfall of most combines before they are worn out,in my opinion anyway
nick...
nick...
- Location
- south norfolk
That seems a huge amount,what about non drum hours.it often seems to be 10/15 % more for travelling
nick...
engine hours are about 50 a year on top of the drum
we work what kit we do have hard - i think a lot of farms are massively over equipped vs what we have, i don’t know how they can afford it
Feldspar
Member
- Location
- Essex, Cambs and Suffolk
I know what you mean. The way I think about it is if we keep kit for longer it will cost more to change, but I can hold back the money I save on reduced depreciation (minus repairs, which can cancel out but I think on balance don't) and keep it in the kitty for a year or two more. If the market works efficiently, and if new prices lift faster than inflation, 2nd hand values ought to track up. We have sold quite a bit of kit over the last few years and have found that a lot has depreciated at 10% or well under in some cases whereas we were accounting for 15% in our books.
More generally though I agree with the sentiment of the OP. I think new equipment has gone up in price so quickly. We had a talk at our local discussion society from Ben Lang from Cambridge's farm business survey after the Brexit vote. He said the issue he saw coming was that the pound devaluation meant better grain prices, but it also meant increased machinery prices, and most farmers at the time hadn't really begun to feel that hit. Well now many more of us are.
I think the loss of BPS will put input & machinery suppliers under some pressure as well, but do we see them dropping their prices? We have dealt with the increase in machinery prices by taking land out of production which has allowed us to keep our existing kit for longer with less risk of loss of timeliness. I think a number of farms will get the point where they start really having to change and will think about things like machinery syndicates more carefully.
It does seem that the machinery people are capturing quite a bit of the economies of scale that increasing machine output should give. The biggest Lexion can be twice the price of a mid range one, even though both need a set of wheels / tracks, both only have one cab, auguer. Yes, the bigger machine will have a bigger engine, longer auger, maybe a bit more tech, but both new models will have needed R&D spent on them. This means that farms getting bigger doesn't offer as much of a scale saving as one might think. With the way ELM seems to be heading, I think those that can will start to look more seriously at reduced cultivation intensity to be able to afford their machinery.
That's 8 seasons here, average 375 rotor hours/year. Many farms do a lot less than that depending on cropping diversity, soil type, location, farm layout, drying capacity etc etc. I used to benchmark with Sentry who averaged closer to 200 hours/year but they grew lots of wheat and rape on contract farms and not much else. Usually poor drying facilities too, so reluctant to go when moist. We were the first to start with winter barley and the last to finish on beans or linseed, doing 400-450 drum hours/year.
That raises lots of questions about machinery efficiency but start growing a dozen crops to keep the combine busy all summer/autumn and you start to complicate & erode the farm margin, plus tying up a harvesting team for longer when you'd make more money getting land work done in better conditions. There's no magic answer to this.
SilliamWhale
Member
Some of the tinwork on some combines is nowhere near rotting. Old Tx's for example
- Location
- south norfolk
I’ll agree with you but if it turns wet it’s better to be overpowered with extra capacity.when we ran a 1075 Deere in the past we would only do 85/90 hours in total each year,but obviously things were cheaper then
nick...
Not so much rotting as wearing through from the amount of grain thats been through them
- Location
- S.E
If we had a more solid basis on this direction it would make life a lot easier. Several things we are doing at the moment all which will be influenced by the path we are led down. Trying to second guess this is a challenge and complicated things.
A few years ago when we did some contract farming we used to put 1200 hect through a 580 or 770 which I recall was in the region of 340 hours mainly in cereals and OSR. That was a stretch, and placed a a lot of pressure on the team. Now we are down to about 850 hect through the combine which seems to make everything work better and gives me a bit more flexibility in running an older machine, hence my question above.
Someone once said to me that in East Anglia over the typical 6-7 weeks of harvest you get (from memory) on average 28 harvesting days so you lose approx 1/3 days to bad weather. That feels like a reasonable assumption. Assuming 10-11 drum hours per day, that gives you in the region of 280-300 hours capacity in a season (assuming no down time), granted that your cropping can impact combine capacity as noted by @Brisel above.
Must buy xxxxx now in case I can't afford it when prices increase in the future...........
Ever had the feeling you're in the wrong industry.
Ever had the feeling you're in the wrong industry.
- Location
- Bedfordshire
I would do that with my old CR9080, and it would have done more with a 35ft header. If a Lexion 770 will not do better than that then it can go back from where it came from. I always knew the Claas marketing machine was good, I thought I could see through it - we shall see. And my average field size would be less than yours.
If I change my spreadsheet to 200 hrs/10acre an hour costs go up to £25.10 per acre. (plus extra corn cart costs).