Dig A Crusher Helps Pioneer Rock Farm

• 
• 7th August 2008
• Materials Handling
 

 

A Welsh plant hirer is using a pair of products from Dig A Crusher to give a new lease of life to a 65 hectare farm in the middle of the beautiful Anglesey countryside.

Anglesey-based plant hirer Dei Owen Plant is extracting value from a seemingly unworkable farm using a pair of products from Dig A Crusher.   The Dig A Crusher 900 crusher bucket and 1200R screening bucket are allowing the company to improve farm land into top grade arable grazing, from what had previously been dismissed as simply "65 hectares of rock".

Quarter Century

Company founder and managing director Dei Owen has been running his plant hire company for almost a quarter century.   Indeed, the company celebrated its 24^th anniversary at the end of May 2008.   The company's range of machines are split roughly 50/50 between the hire fleet and agricultural contracting fleet and are a familiar sight throughout the Anglesey area.

Owen diversified in impressive style earlier this year with the purchase of the Clegyrog farm at Rhosgoch.   "My neighbours thought I had gone mad," Dei Owen says.   "One of them actually asked me why I had bought 65 hectares of rock."  

In fact, Owen had purchased the farm for exactly that reason. He realised the farm needed a complete reorganisation but also saw the potential in the site. "Although there was a substantial farmhouse, the original farm outbuildings had been neglected and the barns had been built in the wrong position," he explains.

Owen set about building three new barns away from the house using crushed rock from the farmland for the footings and concrete mix. This rock was won using a 14 tonne Volvo hydraulic excavator equipped with a hydraulic breaker which effectively demolished a pair of 10 metre high rock sills to the South of the new barns.

The Precambrian Coedana granite, one of the oldest and hardest rocks found on the Earth's surface, is crushed to a variety of sized products using the Dig A Crusher 900 bucket which is carried on a Caterpillar 322DL excavator.   The rock is crushed to a 75 mm grade and then screened using the 1200R which is also carried on the Cat 322DL.   The smaller, 25 mm grade product is used in a concrete mix and the remaining clean 75mm rock is used in drainage projects on the farm.

Productive Pairing

The crushing and screening bucket pairing have proved to be highly productive, according to Owen, producing 30 tonnes of 25 mm and 30 tonnes of 75 mm product an hour.   "It took just three days to crush enough rock for the barn bases," he says.   "And even though we purchased £1,500 of cement, we saved at least £5,000 on materials that would have had to be purchased and brought onto the site. We soon realised the potential of the buckets for demolition work, but we are finding we can utilise them on more and more agricultural applications as well." 

Buoyed by the success of this initial reclamation project, Owen has set about an even larger land improvement programme on the farm.  The old barns will be demolished, and the concrete bases crushed and processed with the Dig A Crusher products.

Owen and his team have just finished draining a 1.5 hectare field that was an "unproductive bog".   "Even in the summer it was too soft to use as grazing land," Owen asserts.   This field has been dug with a series of 1.0 metre drainage ditches at 5.0 metre intervals, each filled by the 75 mm grade material produced by the Dig A Crusher buckets.    "The soil has dried out, and it is awaiting sowing with grass seed for a silage crop," Owen adds.

Impressive Showcase

Having baptised his Dig A Crusher units on his own site, Dei Owen hopes to use the improvements he has made on the farm to showcase his ideas to neighbouring farms and help his company diversify even further.

"Not only have the Dig A Crusher buckets proved that I can bring unproductive land back into use, but it demonstrated the crusher also has great potential for processing formerly useless rock into a useful product. The buckets have also shown their worth not only on the plant side, for processing demolition waste, but in agricultural applications, particularly on other farms. "The buckets can be interchanged to suit demolition and then used for land clearance as well," says Dei Owen. He concludes, "The 1200R screening bucket is scheduled to be used on poorer farmland, removing rock from the topsoil to provide a better grade of arable farmland. The buckets have proved it is possible to dramatically improve the land, which will be a real boon to the farming community."

Further information from:

Sean Heron, Worsley Plant Ltd. 

Tel:  01606 835544