High-End Equipment & Large Producers
Keith Challen
Keith Challen, the Managing Director at FarmEco, decided that Controlled-Traffic Farming was the way forward into the future for their Nottinghamshire farm. He invested in an RTK base station and repeater, two Trimble Autopilots with FmX Displays and integrated EZ-Booms for automatic spray-section shut-off, and an RTK EZ-Steer for his combine. It was a busy time to prepare everything before harvest.
“Trimble and AS Communications provide the most flexible, modern, and most simple to operate RTK system while still giving me the 2cm level of accuracy I want. I use it across all our field operations – establishment, spraying and fertiliser applications and combining.
Base station - GPS and radio antennas.
“We farm 1,400 ha combinable crops, split between winter wheat and oilseed rape, near Bingham in Nottinghamshire. We’d used traditional, satellite GPS systems for ten years across all our field operations and I still hadn’t achieved the year-on-year repeatability and level of accuracy I was looking for until we started using the Trimble system.
“We work to a controlled traffic system and use a Trimble FMX and EZ-Guide 500 with an RTK base station and repeater with EZ-Booms on Chafer sprayers. The flexibility to use it on all farm machinery, rather than restricted to a particular brand, is a great bonus. We’ve also been able to move to direct drilling and reduce our costs.
“It is incredibly easy to use, with touch-screen panels – very operator friendly and quick to learn. It has reduced operator inefficiencies and fatigue, leaves a good-looking tidy crop and although I’ve never had a problem I know that AS Communications is at hand to provide back-up advice whenever I need it”.