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John Fraser of Dingwall-based Mill ‘n’ Mix, and 2021 Farmers Weekly Contractor of the Year, reveals his machinery hits and misses. 

The forage harvesting outfit services and repairs their own, plus their customers’ kit.

We find out what tractors and grass kit take pride of place in John’s shed.

See also: MAN 4×4 truck gets converted to high-speed fert spreader

My father, Robert, bought his first mill in 1984 after leaving Mill Feed Services, and he started building a second machine just a couple of years later.

It morphed into Mill ‘n’ Mix around the time I came into the business in 1998 and, when a big local farm contractor decided to pack up, we branched into forage harvesting and took on some of its customers.

Our first forager, a Jaguar 860, arrived in 2000 from Southern Harvesters.

We always serviced all the kit ourselves, but the engineering side of the business didn’t kick off until we built our current premises in Dingwall in 2013.

It has meant we can keep the team busy year-round repairing both our kit and that of our customers.

I’m fairly loyal to the brands I like, but we’re always looking at the options.

We ran Renault tractors in the early days of grass harvesting – initially an Ares 640 RZ – so the Claas equivalents naturally followed.

The first was a 2007 Axion 830 with a John Deere engine, which wasn’t great, but its replacement, our current 840, has been good.

We also had a Unimog from about 2000 to 2007, which we used to pull the mill. We cover a lot of miles, so the 55mph top speed was brilliant, but it was too lightweight on the backend.

We also had to take it off the silage carting job as it didn’t have the grip required on steep land, so it ended up on the rake.

The forager has always been a Claas Jaguar – first an 860, then an 870, 950 and the current 970. As an all-round machine I think it’s still the best, particularly given its reliability.

I’ve only once failed to finish a day’s work with it and never had more than 12 hours of downtime. I try to keep them fairly new, usually changing every five years.

I also like JCB loading shovels – I just don’t like the price.

A home-built weighing system has more than doubled throughput on the feed mills © Angus Findlay

Sellars at Forres have always been good to us.

The 2019 Jag 970 forager. It will easily knock out 80ha of grass in a day and, in 2020, it chomped through a monster crop of 11t/ha.

We get some good grass crops up here anyway, but that year was particularly warm and wet – normally we’d have got 40ha into the pit, but we only had space for half that and the farmer had to bale the rest. It certainly made the forager grunt.

However, our ownership of the 970 didn’t start well. On its first job after delivery, I got through 4ha before it blew up.

Whether it was a bad blade, or it wasn’t tightened properly, I don’t know, but it made a hell of a mess and the noise and vibration was so big that I thought the cab was going to come off.

Claas sent another machine down within four hours, so we got back up and running.

The delivery lorry took ours away to Sellars, where it was stripped down, rebuilt and returned to the field within 24 hours.

The damage totted up to £20,000 – the blower unit was damaged, the wear panels were all mangled and the dry matter and near-infrared sensors were smashed.

Plus, it needed a full set of blades and drum carriers.

It hasn’t missed a beat since.

A Fortschritt wholecrop header, which both Claas and New Holland sold in their colours.

It was the first mainstream wholecrop header for self-propelled foragers, so I bought a Claas branded one – and it’s the reason I’m bald today.

It was made for a swather, really, but someone had the bright idea to adapt it to run on the front of a forager. The problem was that it really couldn’t handle the power.

Everything broke, and if I could do three hours without stopping then I was doing well – the crop wouldn’t feed in, the bearings collapsed, and shafts sheared.

I’m pretty sure every bearing ran at melting point.

You don’t see many of them now, and for good reason – it was horrendous. They were some of my worst days operating farm machinery.

Luckily, we didn’t have much work for it and I eventually replaced it with a Champion header, which has been a bit better.

My 2-litre Ford Ranger Wildtrak, which I got in 2021. I wasn’t planning on changing my old 3.2-litre version, but the glow plugs started playing up at 70,000 miles, causing it to cut out every so often.

That wasn’t the end of the world but, as I started fixing it, I unearthed a whole heap of problems, not least the inlet manifold almost fully clogged with carbon.

I had a four-month wait for a new one, so had to put up with the knocking and poor starting through the winter, but in hindsight the timing was lucky – if it happened now the wait would be more like a year.

The new one has been pretty good, but the fuel economy is unremarkable. I get about 27mpg for general commuting and towing work, which is no better than the 3.2-litre engine in the old one.

The Champion wholecrop header, which was built in 1995 and I’ve had since 2000. It does about 400ha/year.

I bought it from Denmark and it cost about £10,000, which was a good deal at the time.

The forager is changed every five years, but I’ve no set time for the rest of the machinery. I’m always reviewing things, though the cost of replacements means we’re going to be holding onto kit for longer.

Both tractors and the loading shovel are eight years old now. That said, I don’t want to leave it too long and lose all the second-hand value.

A Fastrac 8330 to replace the 8310. It’s done 9,000 almost fault-free hours and covers almost 15,000 miles a year on the road.

When I change it, I’ll also look at switching to road-friendly Nokian or Michelin Roadbib tyres, as they’re not available for the rims on the 8310.

I’ll be keeping an eye on the JCB auctions – the last one came from there as an ex-demo and it was a steal.

Buying the Fortschritt/Claas header, which was embarrassing because of its chronic lack of reliability.

We had to rebuild the gearbox on the Claas Axion last Christmas, as the B-range synchromesh collapsed while it was on the road carting dung. Fortunately, we managed to limp it home in D-range.

Apparently, it’s not unusual to have synchromesh problems with that gearbox, which is a Massey Ferguson Dyna-6, on tractors over 230hp, so it probably didn’t help that ours had been remapped from 250hp to 275hp.

It certainly pulled well – just a little bit too well for the gearbox.

In the end, the parts bill ran to £12,000. We did all the labour ourselves, which totalled about 80 hours.

Anything to do with AdBlue systems. The Axion needed a new NOx sensor every three months – until we found a solution.

Back in 2003, I designed and built a bespoke weighing system for the feed mills that upped their output from 6t/hour to nearer 16t.

They previously had a single-pot weighing arrangement, which involved sucking in 25kg, then stopping it to dump the grain into the augers and then on into the mill.

My twin-pot system took a lot of designing, but we built all the hardware in the workshop and then roped in a local programmer to write all the software that has made it fully computer controlled.

A blower on the machine sucks the material into the first pot, which is shaped to produce a cyclone affect that separates the barley from the air.

As it’s heavier, the barley drops down and, as the pot sits on a weigh cell, it constantly weighs the material. When it hits 50kg, it automatically switches suction to feed the second identical pot.

Once the suction has switched to the second pot, the first is left to settle for a few seconds to get rid of the residual pressure that ensures an accurate reading. Amplifiers on the load cells compensate for the vibration.

Big sliding valves at the bottom of the pot then drop the barley (or other material) into the augers that feed the bruiser.

All the valves are electro-hydraulic and controlled through the touchscreen PLC programme.

It wasn’t cheap – each system cost about £20,000 to build – but has paid for itself in higher throughput and time savings.

More than one-third of that was in the computer programming and associated hardware, but there are so many valves that it would be impossible to control manually.

Everything. The workshop is key to our survival, especially on the milling side of the business, and we couldn’t afford to run the kit without being about to service and fix it ourselves.

Favourite: Chopping grass on a summer day.

Ford Ranger Wildtrak – as mentioned in “Latest purchase?”.

It’s a toss-up between the Renault Ares 640 RZ and Fastrac 8310, but the latter just edges it for reliability, comfort and usability.

We’ve had no major breakdowns in eight years, which is why I intend to replace it with an 8330.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a 4000-series Fastrac with an extra 30hp.

We had one on demo running the mill, which was alright for a while but it wouldn’t handle a busy couple of months over harvest – it’s not quite heavy enough and would just get bossed about.

The 2008 Claas Axion 830 and, more specifically, its John Deere engine.

The tractor wasn’t too bad, but the head gasket needed replacing every other harvest. It first went at 1,500 hours, so was under warranty, but we went through another three after that.

The EGR cooler was replaced three times too, it was awful on fuel and the last time I stripped it down I found the liner in the sixth cylinder was scored and the piston rings were broken.

I held onto it for too long, but eventually replaced it with the 840. The FPT engine in that is far better – it has way more power and uses the best part of 40 litres less fuel on a long day cultivating.

The Fastrac 8310, which we picked up at one of JCB’s ex-demo AMS auctions on 500 hours.

We went there prepared to spend £120,000 on it but ended up getting it for just under £100,000, which I reckon was £30,000 less than I’d have spent if I’d bought it from a dealer.

It wasn’t without its risks, as it was sold as seen and with no warranty, but it ended up being a great buy.

JCB 8310 and forager © John Fraser

Farmers Weekly 2022 Contractor of the Year is sponsored by Rural Asset Finance.

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