Very expensive, mostly stationary.
A combine runs for perhaps three weeks and then sits in a shed for eleven months. That is normal, and it is one of the reasons arable farming struggles to make money.
What is in the shed.
The Tractor
A Lamborghini R8, which is exactly as sensible as it sounds. Chapter 1 was called Tractoring and was largely about…
The Combine
The most expensive thing on any arable farm and the one that decides whether the year works. It runs for…
The Drill
What puts seed in the ground, at a depth and spacing that matters far more than most people realise. Later…
GNSS Guidance
Auto-steer. The fastest-payback technology in precision agriculture, usually under two years, because it eliminates the overlap and the missed strips…
The Sprayer
Where a large share of the input cost goes, and where variable-rate application saves eight to twenty per cent without…
The Plough
Increasingly controversial. Min-till and direct drilling build organic matter and drought resilience, which on thin brash over limestone is worth…
What actually pays for itself.
| Technology | Payback | Effect | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto-steer / GNSS guidance | Under two years | Eliminates overlap and missed strips | Adopt now |
| Variable-rate inputs | About two years | Yield +2–10%, inputs down 8–20% | Worth it above 100–300ha |
| Yield mapping | With the above | Tells you which ground is actually any good | Essential to the above |
| Drones for mapping and seeding | Fast | Permitted now | Do it |
| Drone spraying of pesticides | — | Prohibited by default in the UK | Not currently possible |
| Robotic weeders | Long | Promising, capital-heavy | Share or contract, do not buy |
| On-farm grain drying and storage | Three to six years | Sell off-peak, cut dockage | Worth modelling |
Why sharing beats owning.
The single biggest capital inefficiency in British arable farming is that every farm owns machinery it uses for three weeks a year. A combine that costs several hundred thousand pounds and runs for twenty-one days is a terrible asset on any measure.
Peer-to-peer machinery sharing is the obvious answer, and it now exists — Only Farmers lets farms rent out idle equipment directly to each other. That is a genuinely good idea that we catalogued as an opportunity and somebody else built first, which is worth saying out loud.
Rent out your own kit.
Only Farmers lets farms hire equipment to each other directly.
What people actually ask.
The two questions this page gets most, answered without a support ticket.
Because the worst ground costs more to crop than it returns, and because hedgerow, scrub and margin do measurable work that a combine never will.
The seasonal state at the top of every page is the short answer, and the farming year is the long one.
Elsewhere on the estate.
/gawping/
/farming/the-numbers/
/wandering/
