“Spreading straw for pigs on your own on a hot day is not a job, it’s a sentence”, says John Ledingham jnr, with a passion and in a tone of voice that makes it quite clear he’s happy never to have to do the job again.

His family rear 1,000 pigs for Grampian Country Foods at Fintry, North of Turriff, Aberdeenshire, with the animals being kept in large airy straw pens.

Together with his father, also called John, and one other employee, they run 600 acres on which they also grow a range of cereals, sugar beet and potatoes, with a beef suckler herd occupying the grassland, and also run a farm shop.

To reduce the workload involved in looking after the pigs, they bought a Spread-A-Bale machine, a simple, hydraulically-operated straw spreading machine that does in a few minutes what previously took hours when done by hand:

“Spreading round bales by hand took ages, even when there were two of you doing it together - one on the loader and the other in the pen to remove the netting and spread the straw around the pen.

“But it got really hard, hot, sweaty and uncomfortable in summer, especially when everyone else was working on the arable and root crops, because you often had to do it single handed, which also made it a very long job”.

When they spread straw manually they normally did it every other day, although now it is such a quick and simple job that they sometimes do it daily:

“We just drop the straw into the middle of the pen in several piles – making sure we cover any dark areas that might have got wet, so we leave a good bed that helps keep the pigs clean – and the pigs spread it around the pen as they play with it”, says John jnr.

He reckons it now takes around an hour to straw down the 12 big pens on the main farmstead. In addition he says they are using much less straw.

For his father the fact that the machine does not tie-up a tractor is crucial: “It only takes a matter of seconds to mount and demount from the telescopic loader, and is self-loading”.

The fact that the machine spread the straw whole, rather than chopping it as some alternative machines do, means it creates very little dust, this being a major benefit to the health of both pigs and staff.

For further information please contact:

CHK PLC
Pyms Lane
Crewe
Cheshire CW1 3PJ, UK
Tel : +44 (0)270 252894

sales@chkplc.co.uk