MAJOR Tankers Help Barfoots Make The Best Use Of Digestate

With over 50million litres of liquid to deal with each year from a 2.3MW digester, Barfoot Farms in West Sussex has a pretty slick system in place to handle its slurry.

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"Growing some 5000acres of vegetables, we're keen to make best use of the nutrient value of the digestate that we can," explains sweetcorn manager Grant Lumsden.

"With NPK values of 3%:1%:3%, it's well worth having but we need to apply it at the right time to give young crops a boost as they emerge."

For the land closest to the plant, the farm's existing irrigation mains are used to pump digestate to where it's needed and modified boom irrigators apply it at rates of up to 60cu.m/ha. But the area that falls under the main farm's irrigation is just 10% of the business' ground. To get it to the other outlying sites – some up to 10miles away – a different strategy was required.

"It was clear that we would need to use tankers to make the most of the digestate across all of our ground so we started looking at the various choices.

"Being new to the slurry game we were fairly green and the options were a bit bewildering. While there are plenty of manufacturers to choose from, it was Major Equipment that sat down with us a really talked us through the selection process."

Having looked around and priced up the alternatives, Mr Lumsden was convinced that Major offered the best value for money and its machines had certain significant advantages.

"From experience with Major grass kit I know it is reliable and well built. With the tankers it's no different - they've clearly thought the design through.

"While others have lugs welded to the tank skin to carry the linkage, Major's are connected directly to the chassis – that's got to put less strain on the machine so it should last longer.

On the back of that and the advice he received initially, Mr Lumsden ordered one of Major's 3500gallon tandem axle tankers which arrived in mid-2014. It was immediately put to work hauling digestate to the outlying ground and applying it via a 5m trailing shoe setup.

"As well as spreading the load in the field, having tandem axles makes a big difference to stability on the road. Carting slurry up to 10 miles that's important.

"But of course there's double the amount of rubber to wear out and replace so we opted to have the steering rear axle. It makes the tanker so much more manouevrable and on concrete there's no scuffing which is important with tyres costing £1000 a pop."

As regards filling, the Major was fitted with a standard Battioni vacuum pump with a drop down fill-arm. It makes loading a clean, two to three minute job. However the single machine is stretched to capacity when the spreading window opens in spring.

"Given how well the first tanker has performed over the last year, last December we decided to order a second.

"It has a 10m dribble-bar which is better suited to bare ground applications and fits well with the set-up of our veg beds."

In addition, having another of the same means staff are familiar with the controls and inner workings of the machine and there's peace of mind that's the tankers are reliable pieces of kit, well capable of fulfilling their role.

"With a pair of tankers filling from three 1200cu.m holding tanks on the outlying ground and trucks running to them, we can now comfortably cover some serious ground. It's all down to logistics," concludes Mr Lumsden.

"We needed a tanker to get digestate out to our other land but knew just one wouldn't be able to get it all done in the relatively tight eight week window in the spring before we start sowing our vegetable crops. Having two makes all the difference and means we have the flexibility to go when the conditions are just right."