Canterbury farmer reclaims farm life with spreader upgrade

A strong focus on producing their dairy feed requirements on-farm meant North Canterbury producer Sandy Fleming used to spend most of his time on the family’s fertiliser spreader, however that’s all changed in recent years after they decided to invest in an upgrade.

Sandy Fleming, who farms with his family near Culverden in North Canterbury, pictured with his daughter, Violet, and son, Lucas, and the family’s Agrispread AS65 spreader

A strong focus on producing their dairy feed requirements on-farm meant North Canterbury producer Sandy Fleming used to spend most of his time on the family’s fertiliser spreader. However, that’s all changed in recent years after they decided to invest in an upgrade.

Sandy is the fourth generation in the Fleming farming family near Culverden. Together with his father, Mark, they milk about 1050 predominantly Friesian cows on a 400-hectare property and grow 300 yearling replacements, 300 rising two-year-old replacements and young bulls on a 230ha support block.

“We produce 130 bulls at the other farm and some are used over our cows, including Speckle Park bulls, while Jersey bulls are used over our ‘first-calvers’ and some of the bulls are also fattened for processing,” Sandy said.

With dairy and beef commodities currently in good shape, Sandy said the family would look to increase their cow numbers, as well as continue to produce their feed “in-house”. AR1 ryegrass is grown for the cows and pea and barley cereal crops are produced for silage production.

“We do buy-in some straw, but we like to cut and make our own silage. We also occasionally produce hay and grass bales on our support block.”

Fertilisers are spread every month on the grasses from September through to April, and the cereals receive one application after establishment. The Flemings apply N-Protect, superphosphate and ammonium sulphate fertilisers, and, like most growers, their nitrogen (N) applications are capped, restricting them to applying a maximum of 190 units of N per annum.

Sandy said they were previously using a twin axle spreader, but then upgraded to an Agrispread single axle system after considering various options and viewing it at the South Island Agricultural Field Days, and it had since offered multiple benefits.

In practical terms, it allowed the Flemings to set their spread width out to 24 metres compared with 15m with their previous spreader, which immediately meant significantly less time spreading for Sandy. The Agrispread range is accredited to spread to 36m depending on weather conditions.

“All my time was spreading fertiliser, whereas now I have the time to go and do other farm jobs,” Sandy said.

The Flemings' Agrispread AS65 spreader holds about four tonnes of nitrogen and up to 9t of lime and is pulled by either John Deere 7290 or Fendt 828 tractors.

“Our previous spreader was a good wagon and run off a cog, but it’s not as good as the Agrispread hydraulic drive system,” Sandy said.

The Agrispread machine also offers hydraulic control of the spinners and drop point adjustment, as well as the use of load cells to ensure the most accurate spreading of material right across its working width.

The hydraulic-driven spreaders are compatible with most ISOBUS GPS systems for monitoring and control of spread rates from inside the cab, and they come ready for variable rate applications and with the option of section control.

“We had a few issues to sort out initially, but once we had it set up, we found it to be very accurate,” Sandy said.
“We’ve always been fans of load cells and the accuracy is brilliant and the spread pattern is very good.
Every time I spread something different, I do 5ha, write the weight down and I’ve got everything saved. Then I run the numbers and once I know, I just keep going.”

Sandy said the Agrispread spreader also was a quality-built machine that still “looked like new” and it was great for traversing over pivot ruts compared with the tandem axle spreader.

He said in future with the machine, he may look to add “hungry boards” to increase its capacity, section control, variable rate applications and tractor spreading tyres for climbing hills, which he had seen on the Agrispread Facebook page.