Use data to make informed farm machinery decisions

Tom Rees farms at Dudwell in Pembrokeshire, Wales. He said:“I found the machinery review very interesting. It was a lot more thorough than I thought it would be!

“I was nervous before doing the review, because I thought, being a small farm, that our machinery costs would be fairly high because we don’t have the area to spread it over. But what became apparent once we started getting the results of our own machinery review back, was that by using large kit, running it for a long time and doing repairs in-house – this makes economic sense for us.”

Comparing costs

22 Monitor Farms so far have done the labour and machinery review. While this isn't a big enough data set to draw any firm conclusions from yet, there seem to be some common characteristics of the farms with the lowest 25% of costs:

• Depreciation below £63/ha
• Low repair costs through tactical hiring and experience
• Diesel use below 100 L/ha
• Farm size 500 – 1,000 ha

Tom’s total arable labour and machinery cost, at £403/ha, was around the average for all 22 farms. He keeps machinery and implement costs extremely low because the family can do a lot of the repairs themselves. But, Tom’s total arable labour costs are high in comparison with the group.

Harry Henderson, AHDB, said: “Every farm is different. There’s no single strategy to suit everyone. It’s important to bear in mind that having the lowest possible costs isn’t necessarily the aim – machinery also needs to be reliable and fit for purpose."