With the high prices that come with modern machinery investment and maintenance there are big savings to be made by making each machine more efficient. Catalyst Farming businesses are actively using a number of approaches to significantly reduce machinery costs.
Just looking at the depreciation and warranties, which are often calculated on engine hours, it is important that the machine is working/making money for as much of the time the engine is running as possible. On large machines like combine harvesters, which can often cost half a million pounds or more, the depreciation alone can cost a lot each year.
Make use of the machine’s own data
Most modern machines have telematics onboard which record every movement and operation of each machine. The easiest way to check the efficiency of a machine is to look at the engine hour utilisation which is a breakdown of total engine hours into working hours, idle hours and transport hours. If the idle hours take up a large percentage of the total engine hours without a good reason, then there is probably room for improvement.
Developing operator excellence
At Catalyst Farming, we have found the easiest way to improve the utilisation of engine hours is to work to enhance the skills of the operators. We collect the data from the different partners, compare them and share results with our operators for discussion. A bit of healthy competition between operators is always helpful as they are all interested in being the best!
In the short time that we have been recording machinery efficiencies in Catalyst Farming, we have already seen big improvements such as idle times being reduced by 30-40%.
