“It’s a fair improvement over our previous spreader,” says Ian Haines of Hoplands Farm, Conningsby, Lincs, about his Exacta TL GEOSPREAD. “It would be a backward step to go away from this level of application accuracy.”
The Haines family grows around 700 acres of crops, comprising sugar beet, potatoes, winter wheat, winter barley and beans. Field sizes range from 2-60 acres, and almost all are irregular shapes.
“We’ve run the GEOSPREAD for five seasons and it’s saved us a lot of money by putting fertilisers exactly where its needed,” he says. “There’s no waste, no overlaps and I no longer need an extra bag to finish a field. It’s usually within 20kg of a field’s target tonnage.”
“This level of accuracy has also made logistics much better too – there’s no pointless running around to finish off a field. It’s exact, and it’s so simple to use.”
Having had a successful demonstration from Irelands Farm Machinery, the spreader arrived in 2017, and the farm hasn’t looked back, gaining greater accuracy and saving money along the way.
Applications are mostly carried out on 24m tramlines, and are typically from 150kg/ha. But applying high rates of base fertiliser onto potato ground sees this cut back to a 12m spread width, as application rates nudge 1,200kg/ha.
“Halving the spread width lets me travel with a bit more forward speed with these higher rates, after which we’ll run the bed former through ready to put the potatoes in,” explains Ian. “We just don’t waste any fertiliser – the spread pattern management using auto section control is just superb, and I can see where it all goes.”
In the cab, an IsoMatch Tellus GO+ terminal provides connectivity with his MF tractors, but looking ahead, he’d like to adopt RTK through his existing guidance system.
“Variable rates will probably be the next step, and we can make more use of this clever spreader technology to continue with more efficiency,” he says. “