Our second season of Contractor Comment kicks off with the first of four new contributors – Daniel Freeland-Cook of Yetholm in the Scottish Borders.

See also: High kit prices and falling profits pinch contractor margins

Q. How did you get into contracting?

I started doing a bit of contracting in 2000. Like many young lads, I was keen to pick up work to supplement the family’s beef and sheep business.

We now specialise in the sowing and harvesting of grass and green crops, and we also contract-farm about 2,500 ewes.

These livestock agreements can bring other benefits. For example, as well as looking after their sheep, we get to buy any surplus grass, do all the field work, and use some of their sheds for our stock.

Q. Main contracting enterprises today?

Contract-farming the 2,500 ewes is a year-round affair. Then we do the full silage and hay services – mow, ted, rake and bale – as well as reseeding grass and sowing kale. Plus, we’ve run diggers for the past two decades, mainly on forestry work.

We’ve cut back on the contracting side over the past few years – we gave up 400ha of ploughing and drilling, and no longer bale our own straw.

This is in part because I’ve got a young family who I would like to spend time with. But it’s also because the machinery now costs so much.

High prices have been gradually chipping away at contracting returns and it’s not worth doing mad hours, and wearing out the kit that we also need for our own farm, for wafer-thin margins.

For it to be sustainable, the price of equipment has to come down – we can’t keep ramping the rates up.

Then again, maybe that’s where environmental subsidies come in… rather than paying for kit to work the land, everyone simply puts in trees, hedgerows and grass mixes.

That way, the arable guys can exploit the stewardship money, and we can exploit the extra grazing land.

Q. Current workload?

Most of the stock needs feeding at this time of year, we’re in the middle of a crazy two weeks of lambing and, because of the wet weather, we’re now on our fourth attempt at lifting the fodder beet.

We put in 16ha of a variety called Robbos this year and, thanks to double-rate hen pen (chicken muck) rolled in ahead of the precision drill, it delivered massive yields. They topped 75t/ha in places.

But problems first arose in early November, when we were hit with a big dump of snow and temperatures dropped as low as -10C. Though Robbos is frost-hardy, it was too much for it and the heads died off.

As a result, we’ve had to bottom lift it. This has meant it’s too stony to put through the chopper bucket, so instead we’ve been spreading it in the sheep fields with the muckspreader.

The harvesting holdups meant I had to buy some in to keep us going, at £40/t ex-farm.

Fodder beet might not be cheap to grow, but the sheep do well on it and it has halved the feed bill for store.

The bullocks are currently getting 15kg of chopped beet and 2kg beef concentrate per head, plus ad-lib silage in ring feeder.

Q. Any forms of diversification?

We’ve run diggers for 20 years and there’s still an abundance of work for them.

I stick to agricultural and forestry stuff, as we’re on red diesel and civils brings in a whole lot more red tape and insurance complications.

The main machine, a JCB 150HD X-series, clocks about about 1,000 hours through the winter.

Eighty percent of that is for our landlord, Roxburgh Estate, building and maintaining roads, putting in forestry drainage and mounding to prep for the next crop of trees.

I could probably find work for three diggers if I wanted to, but I’m put off by the thought of trying to find and manage operators for them.

If anything, I’d prefer to invest that money in a heavy-duty tractor-drawn vibrating roller.

We currently hire in a little one to hammer in the roadways, so it would add an income stream and increase our efficiency. The catch is that they’re the best part of £20,000.

Q. Most profitable contracting enterprise?

Road building tops it – we can bring in £4,000/day when we’re really at it, with a digger on the road, a forklift in the quarry and three dump trailers ferrying material.

Running the Fusion can also be pretty profitable – but it can also be woefully inefficient.

Big, flat fields are good money, as we might be able to knock out 500 bales in a day, at £10/bale.

However, the price stays the same when our output is halved on hilly land, as we have to place each bale safely.

Fertiliser spreading is a decent earner, particularly if we’re only putting on hundred weight (50kg) at 24m. Stops are infrequent and we can really cover the ground, so the £12.35/ha rate soon racks up.

Q. Least profitable contracting enterprise?

A tractor and man is the least efficient way to earn money. I’ve clocked more hours than I care to remember doing just that, but these days I only go out if I’m pulling my own implements.

Raking is currently our least profitable service, despite me having upped the rate from £17/ha to £25/ha. It’ll be going up by a couple of quid again this year.

There’s a lot of stopping and starting, as most of the fields are small, we’ve only got one baler, and I don’t like to get too far ahead.

Hedgecutting would probably have been a low earner if I hadn’t seen sense.

I was close to buying one, until it dawned on me that the price we could charge would barely cover the cost of the tractor and man, let alone the £30,000 hedger on the back.

Q. Biggest threats to your business?

The weather. We had our best-ever fodder beet crop this year, until it came to getting it out of the ground and into the clamp.

Winter storms also cause havoc, though not always to our detriment.

Two windy nights during storm Arwen in 2021 brought down enough trees on the estate to give us four years’ worth of work.

We’re still building forwarder tracks, HGV access and new roads, plus removing stumps, mounding and putting in forestry drainage.

The other big threat is machinery reliability. Warranties don’t stop tractors breaking down and potentially being laid off for weeks.

With only three tractors and a lot of mouths to feed, we can ill afford problems.

Q. Difficulties with staff recruitment?

Finding staff who don’t cost you a fortune and trash your gear is always tricky, but we’re lucky in having six family members in the business.

We regularly use a squad of four Irish lads that work on several farms in the area, not just for lambing, but also fencing, dyking and tractor driving.

We tend to find them through a combination of Facebook and word of mouth and, fortunately, folk are often keen to come and work here.

They really buy into the lifestyle, even if we sometimes work like mad.

Finding people to maintain the stone walls is actually one of the hardest things – they’re all busy, and they don’t want to do the jobs if they can’t get to them in a pickup.

I generally think it’s harder to find staff for specific jobs.

The digger side of the business has plenty of scope to grow, but employing people for the job is likely to bring too many headaches.

They’d probably want a pickup, a big wage and won’t work weekends. It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Q. What excites you about the season ahead?

The dream is that it all goes to plan.

But there are plenty of things that don’t excite me, not least the prospect of paying to fix machinery.

Costs have gone through the roof and, even with the 6,000-hour tractor warranty, we’ve got to shell out a £400 excess fee each time something goes wrong.

Q. New machines for 2024?

Our new fixed-chamber McHale Fusion 4 combi baler-wrapper should be delivered later this month.

We can get away with soft-centred bales as we’re no longer dealing with straw, and all the silage is going into bunkers and feed passages.

If we were putting it through an unroller then it might be a different story.

We paid £80,000 for it, which is a big jump from the £65,000 for the old Fusion 3 – particularly considering it’s basically the same baler with a new pick-up.

Given there hasn’t been much improvement in output, it won’t be easy to find the extra £15,000.

As with the old one, we’ve got the option of film-on-film wrapping. It can be a bit tempestuous, especially in dry conditions, so we tend to only use it for the best-quality sheep silage where it’s worth persevering to get a better seal on the crop.

By comparison, we can do thousands of bales without any bother when putting net on first.

From my experience, there’s no difference in price between the two approaches (film on film with four layers on the back, versus net and film with five layers) – it’s just that the former is less efficient because there are so many more stoppages.

In a nutshell, both are expensive – each bale has about £6’s worth of plastic and net, and that’s before you’ve accounted for the cost of the tractor, baler and driver, and 50p/bale of diesel.

Then there’s the cost of getting rid of it. A 14cu m skip is now £750.

Q. Anything else you fancy?

I priced up a new low-loader last year as the current one is 20 years old and due for renewal. But it was crazy money and, as ours goes through a HGV workshop every year and is still in decent nick, I decided to hold off for now.

A second-hand Vaderstad Carrier is on the list too. We’ve got a very shallow layer of topsoil with gravel underneath, so discs and/or the Bomford Dyna-Drive are the only ways to prepare land for green crops.

Carriers are hard to come by for anything like sensible money, though. And, if I won the lottery, I’d love to run a big square baler.

That said, the muck-for-straw deal we’ve got with four local arable farms works well, as the straw is baled for me. All we have to do is pick it up.

Q. Overwinter projects?

Digger work dominates the winter months, so there’s not much scope for other projects.

Plus, all the dosh has gone on new sheds. A 80sq ft straw shed went up last spring, and another 100x40ft the year before.

Q. Current contractor frustrations?

The cost of machinery bugs me, as does communicating with customers in the middle of silage season.

Everyone ends up in a frenzy and it’s difficult to manage expectations – especially when there’s no phone signal up our valley. 

Other than that, it would have to be my inability to sweet talk kale into growing reliably, even when conditions are good.

Unlike the fodder beet, it might not move for a whole month after drilling, which always scares me, then it gets walloped by flea beetles.