Tama Assist Meet Our Baling Voices – A New ‘Tama News’ Series
Welcome to the very first edition of our new Tama News feature – Our Baling Voices.
This series is all about sharing real world experiences from farmers, contractors, and baler drivers across the UK, giving you an honest look at how different operations run, the challenges they face, and the decisions they make around baling.
We’ll be using your feedback to make sure these stories stay relevant to the machines and systems you work with every day. Our aim is simple: to share practical insight from real people, doing the job, season after season, whilst simultaneously encouraging you all to have your say and share your knowledge and experience with the wider farming community.
Kate – South West
Kate runs a dairy farm with 180 cows on 250 acres of owned land, alongside a successful silage contracting business. She operates three wrapper combination balers across a 60-mile radius from the home farm.
Gethin – Wales
Gethin is a livestock farmer running a 60-head Hereford beef herd and 640 ewes. He makes round bale silage, hay, and a small amount of straw across his own land and rented ground.
Duncan – Scotland
Duncan is a beef producer and straw contractor, running 150 head of Angus and Shorthorns. Together with his brother, their contracting business produces around 50,000 round and square bales each season for home use and local sales.
Conor – East Anglia
Conor has been a baler driver for a large agricultural contractor for four seasons. In the off-season, he’s gained overseas experience working with crews in New Zealand, Australia, and Texas, USA.
We’re kicking off the series with Duncan from Scotland, who shares a snapshot of life in a busy beef and contracting business:
“Right, I’ll give you a wee bit of background on us. The contracting business is now run by myself and me brother, we’re the third generation on the home farm, and the contracting side is something I’ve built to carry it forward for the next generation. At the minute we’re running a mixed fleet of Massey combi balers and Krone and New Holland square balers. We’re lucky with the dealers we’ve got locally, good parts lads and decent technicians make a massive difference in our line of work.
After a summer of looking over hedges at what everyone else is running, we’ve seen more Massey squares appearing locally. And after a few too many pilsners and a lot of walking at Hannover (Agritechnica), me brothers also got his eye on some shiny Krone metal for the shed!
We’ve talked for years about moving to a single brand fleet, but never quite taken the plunge. With one of our New Hollands well past its best (and probably two seasons overdue for replacing), it feels like the right time to make a change…the big question is….which brand do we put all our eggs in? Tough decision!”
Over to you, based on what’s in your shed/line up what would you suggest Duncan runs this coming season?
Click the link below, choose your preffered brand and you will see the live response summary. Alternatively, check back in a week or so and we will upload the final poll results on this blog.
Thanks to Duncan for kicking off our new series and sharing an honest look at life inside a busy Scottish beef and contracting operation. Over the coming months, we’ll be catching up with more of our Baling Voices from across the country, each with a different system, scale, and perspective.
Make sure you cast your vote above and keep an eye on future editions of Tama News to see how these stories develop. If you’d like to be involved in a future feature, we’d love to hear from you; simply drop us a line at marketing-uk@tama-uk.co.uk.