Drilling 16,000ha in six weeks
Cultivating and drilling 25,000ha in Ukraine last autumn meant round-the-clock work, says Robin Jewer, plus the added complication of a giant photo shoot.
It all came about because of an advert. I was already working for a farming company in Ukraine and my translator and I were sheltering from the rain in the local coffee house. We came across an advert in Farmers Weekly from another agricultural company farming in the Ukraine.
By 8 o’clock that same evening I had accepted a job offer from them to manage 25,000ha on seven farms spread over an area the size of the United Kingdom.
The reason behind the job offer? I had managed to plant 2500ha in one of the wettest springs with only five machines and they had managed to plant only 800ha with 75 machines.
So on 1 June 2008 I started my new job. The task involved turning 25,000ha of land which had not been cultivated for 15 years into a seed-bed for winter rape and winter wheat, using a combination of Simba Solos and Top Downs. We ploughed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and averaged 3000ha a week.
During the last week of July the decision was made to hold a photo shoot for Horsch. We had just bought 10 9m Horsch drills and the supplier wanted to take pictures of them all working in the same field.
This involved moving each drill on a low loader by road 250km to the field. So we had to stop cultivating at the other six farms and instead move all the machinery to the photo shoot location.
The shoot took three days to set up and complete, after which five of the drills moved to eastern Ukraine. That left me five drills, seven cultivators, twelve John Deere 8000s, eight John Deere 6000s, five 18m sprayers, three 8t fertiliser spreaders, three Deere loaders and Simba Solos to reach my target of 25,000ha.
We planned to run the drills and seven cultivators in a gang like a harvesting crew in USA, where we would cultivate in front of the planters, spray herbicide, spread fertiliser and then move to the next field, working on a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a- week basis.
The big push started on 4 August. The average field size here is about 25ha, with the distance between fields anything up to 50km. The police fine was £100 if you had the wrong documents, and they took a day to release the tractor.
Some fields could be on the boggy side. The highest number of tractors needed to pull out a stuck drill was three Deere 8000s. It was a relief to see that the middle two tractors were still in one piece afterwards.
Our best 24-hour drilling period was 500ha and our worst was 120ha. Total fuel consumption for the machines was 6000 litres every 24 hours. We had a service crew with us 24 hours a day, plus me and my set of spanners.
So what did we achieve? We drilled 16,000ha with five drills in six weeks. The drills travelled 1200km on the road between bases, in addition to travelling from field to field.
I found out how many people it takes to manually push a big drill, had a lot of sleepless nights and met a lot of interesting people. Ukraine is an interesting place to farm. The weather can be very extreme, but I’ve had the time of my life. I’ve also had the chance to plant more crops in 18 months than the average farmer would plant in his lifetime.
With four weeks of rain in September and a total of 12,000ha of rape and 4000ha of wheat planted, I was told that we could not plant any more because of the global recession, which meant the agricultural company I work for could not afford to take any more crops through to harvest.
So we were told to drive all the machines to our main base. My employers have become a casualty of the world recession and I am now looking for a new position to start from May 2009 onwards.
- If you would like to talk to Robin Jewer about possible opportunities, either in Ukraine or elsewhere, you can contact him at organicrob@btinternet.com
- If you have any stories of big machinery endeavours where you covered masses of ground in a short time, contact us at fwmachinery@rbi.co.uk