REPORT: The first Lucas G self-propelled feeder wagon to find a home in the UK now resides on a 330-cow dairy in Somerset. But it arrived there via a circuitous route…
Why are self-loading, self-propelled feeder wagons commonplace across Europe but remain a rarity on livestock units in the UK and Ireland? It’s a question that had bugged Somerset dairy farmer Daniel Macey for decades. Not one to let something drop, four years ago he set out on his quest to find out why, with a slightly inevitable result…
“Seeing dairy units all over the Continent running self-propelleds made me inquisitive – why do we stick with trailed mixers while they can justify the expense of a standalone machine?” he asks. “It became something of an itch that I had to scratch and I’d regularly sit down in the evenings to trawl the internet for the reasoning and what the potential pitfalls might be. Predictably that lead me onto various manufacturers’ and dealers’ sites selling machines and I started to work out some figures based on what it costs to run a loader, tractor and pto-driven wagon against what a S-P setup might cost.
“When I really started to drill down into the numbers it didn’t look too silly, so long as you could buy the machine for a reasonable sum in the first place.”
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