The Hedge Cutter.
A six-and-a-half metre reach flail hedge cutter. Legally unusable for six months of the year, which is the most important thing on this page. £160 a day, machine only, collected from here.
The specification.
The machine
- Reach
- 6.5 mFrom the tractor centre line
- Head
- Flail, 1.2 mNot a saw head. It will not take anything over 40 mm
- Tractor required
- 110 hp with a cab and a guardAnd side ballast, which people forget
- Linkage
- Rear-mounted, category II, with stabilisersFitting it takes about forty minutes
In work
- Hydraulics
- Independent tank and coolerFitted to the machine, not the tractor
- Output, realistic
- 1.5–2.5 km/dayOne side, one pass
- Cutting season
- 1 September to 28 FebruaryIt is an offence to cut outside that, with narrow exceptions
- Weight
- 1.5 tonnesAll of it on one side of the tractor
Figures are from the machine itself rather than from a brochure. Where the two disagree, the brochure is wrong.
What it fits.
A 110 hp tractor with a guarded cab, stabilisers and about 600 kg of side ballast. It is the fiddliest thing here to mount and the mounting is not optional.
If you are not certain your tractor will do it, ring before you hitch up rather than after. We have had two people arrive with the wrong linkage category and one with no air brakes, and all three of those were avoidable phone calls.
Who has actually used it.
Named because a machine with a history is easier to trust than a machine with a specification. Where somebody broke something, it says so.
Two contractors
Who between them do most of the parish
A neighbouring estate
For a fortnight every January
This farm
Every third year on each hedge, which is the rotation we settled on
What it is bad at. It is unusable from the first of March to the end of August under the cross-compliance hedgerow rules, so it earns nothing for half the year and everybody wants it in the same twelve weeks of winter mud. It is also a flail rather than a saw, which means it does a poor job on anything woody and a genuinely bad job on a hedge that has been left four years. And it has taken out two sets of telephone wires in the parish, neither of them ours, which is the sort of thing that follows a machine around.
When it is free.
Half days are two thirds of the day rate, because the loading, the walk round and the clean take the same time either way.
Tuesday8 September
Thursday10 September
Monday15 September
Pick a time and we will hold it for ten minutes. Hold that day
This is a demonstration build. Nothing here books anything, no deposit is taken and no card details are collected at any point. Prices are indicative and are published so the arithmetic can be argued with.
The terms, in four lines.
£160 a day
Machine only. No fuel, no operator.
Your insurance
Hired-in plant cover, shown before it leaves.
Owner keeps first call
If it is our weather, it comes home.
Back clean and full
Or it comes back with an invoice.
The other seven.
The 6m Tine Drill
Six metres of tine drill, bought in a fit of optimism in 2021 and used for about nine days a…
The Cambridge Rolls
Twelve point three metres of ring rolls. The cheapest thing to hire here and the one with the longest waiting…
The 3m Topper
A three-metre flail topper for margins, paddocks and the parts of a field a combine is never going to see.
The Bale Wrapper
A trailed round-bale wrapper. Nobody hires this because they want to. They hire it because the forecast changed.
The Post Knocker
A tractor-mounted post driver. The single most useful item on this list and the one most likely to hurt somebody.
The Subsoiler
A three-leg low-disturbance subsoiler. The most misused machine in British arable farming and we have misused it ourselves.
The 16t Grain Trailer
Sixteen tonnes, sprung drawbar, commercial axles and a working tarpaulin, which is rarer than it should be.
Before you hire anything.
Insurance, briefings, and the two things we will not hire out at all.
