Romsley, Bridgnorth based farming enterprise of GC & JM Norgrove can trace their history back for over 100 years. Initially offering very reputable contract threshing and general farm services, but 100 years on, the business now farms some 450 acres of arable and grassland. A full-service contractor providing all-arable services such as cultivation, drilling, fertiliser and spraying, combining, baling, hedging and a whole host of other support.
Typical arable cropping includes winter barley, winter wheat, winter oats, oil seed rape, spring barley and around 40 acres of fodder beet, which they grow as part of a rotation plan - selling on the produce. They also have around 100 acres of permanent grassland producing and selling the hay to the open market.
Gerald Norgrove and his Son-in-Law, Adrian Rickhussrun the family-farm and they invest in high quality machinery to ensure great field performance and reliability. They also value cost-effectiveness, to ensure they get the best return on investment. “One of the best machinery purchase decisions we made,” commented Adrian Rickhuss, “was the Sulky X40 fertiliser spreader. We’ve had three Sulky’s in a row and last year we purchased our second X40 Econov and it’s proven to be not only highly accurate, but also a big money saver.”
The Sulky X40 is a 4200-litre capacity twin-disc spreader which provides left and right modulation on a curved application pattern and incorporates a stand-alone ISOBUS control system. This automates the fertiliser spread pattern and minimises overlap, using an integrated section control. The result is a major reduction in ‘over-and-under’ application of fertiliser and optimisation of crop yield performance.
“We run six John Deere tractors, all supported by our local dealer, Tallis Amos Group. They are also our local Sulky dealer and together with their integrated solutions team and Sulky’s Richard German, I’ve had some great back-up in helping me to install and set-up the machine to get the most efficient field performance.” said Adrian. “We travel from farm to farm and have an integrated Rekord bag lifter so we can handle fertiliser straight from the customer’s storage pile - it really works to our advantage.”
But what are the savings worth using the Sulky X40 Econov? “We work with many awkward shapes of fields,” said Adrian, “and this is where the Sulky really comes into its own. The on-board section control and overlap management system, automatically takes over and reduces any over-spread and this means we are saving around ten-per cent of our fertiliser bill. For our farm alone, that equates to not having to buy fertiliser for our fodder beet and grassland crops, so it’s money in the pocket for both ourselves and our customers. ”
