The Scottish Farmer spoke to Aberdeenshire farmer Charlie Duguid of Gairnieston Farm, Turriff, to gather his view on precision farming.
Charlie farms alongside his stepfather Philip Benzie on an arable and vegetable enterprise. Encompassing 1500 hectares of land including 600 hectares of cereals such as malting barley and wheat as a break crop, 600 hectares of potatoes, and 300 hectares of carrots and parsnips. Land includes additionally rented pasture within a 60-mile radius of Gairnieston Farm.
What does precision farming mean to you?
“We incorporate precision farming on a daily basis on our farm. Advances from GPS used to record field history and boundary information, to JCB four-wheel steer allowing increased versatility during carrot inter-row weeding.”
How important is improving efficiency on the farm?
“It is going to become increasing important due to staff shortages within the industry. Not necessarily operators but those who are willing to get involved with laborious tasks such as weed control, these workers just aren’t as readily available anymore.
“There is already coming a bigger place for technology as GPS systems and computer programmes provide farmers with an insight into production levels, field boundaries and field history.”
How do you use equipment to increase output/productivity on farm?
“Selecting the correct equipment for the job helps to increase productivity, as an example we select tractors that can be fitted with narrow wheels to use on vegetable beds.
Ensuring the correct size of tractor is being used is also important as a tractor with unnecessary horsepower will bring increased fuel costs.”
What was the best piece of equipment you bought in the last 10 years?
“The self-propelled Grimme Varitron 270 Platinum harvester for carrot beds. We bought the first one back in 2018 and haven’t looked back since.”
What features does it have?
“With the seven tonne bunker we are now able to lift rows to the edges of the field, as opposed to trailing tractors and trailers up and down.”
Do you use GPS? When did you start? How do you use it?
“Yes, we have been using GPS since 2007 and as the years progressed, we have installed it to all our tractors and machinery.
“The John Deere GPS system is easy to use, and it can be retrofitted to any tractor, we find it useful when ridging potato beds for destoners, inputting boundary information, recording previous work carried out in fields and for collecting data to provide an overview of performance and chemical usage.”
What is the next piece of equipment you want?
“Equipment investment is an ongoing affair, and you never know what you will need to change in a hurry, but we are looking at updating some of our John Deere tractors.”
What tractors do you use? Why?
“Around 75% of the tractors we use are the John Deere 6R 125, we have used John Deere for the last 25 years due their reliability and a good relationship with the dealer network at Turriff and Elgin. The following 25% are JCB Fastrac 4220’s as they provide the four-wheel steer which gives the best provision.
Charlie concluded
“Precision farming is going to become important in everyone lives as staffing levels are against us, we need to utilise all the technology for what we can do ourselves.”
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