Soils focus revitalises contractor's drainage service

While post-harvest remains the busy period, the broad range of crops grown means this extends from July to October, while pre-spring drilling is another good time to drain land.

Investment

“If the crop is poor or has failed it may be a better investment to use the summer months to drain the field while it is standing,” he says.

The post-war period was the boom time for land drainage and in the 1970s and 1980s Maff (now Defra) grant funding enabled farmers to invest in new or refurbished drainage systems.

“Adas figures collected for Maff show that 100,000ha of land a year was drained in the late 1970s, but by the early 1990s it was less than 10ha a year,” says Mr Burtonshaw.

“There was very little land drainage carried out until interest in soil health really took off in the last decade.”

This coincided with one of the wettest summers on record in 2012, when business for the company, which had diversified into sports field and utilities work and begun a marketing drive to keep going, suddenly saw an upturn.

At the same time, Mr Burtonshaw decided to undertake a Nuffield scholarship to see how different techniques around the world could benefit the business.

“I realised I had little knowledge of how our contemporaries in different countries worked,” he says.

“And I was particularly interested in how GPS could increase the accuracy of drainage.”

What he found was akin to visiting another planet, he says.

“In the USA contractors had all the latest kit and were universally using tech such as GPS grade control and surveying,” he says.

Research

“As the areas being drained were so large, machines offered much higher outputs than I was accustomed to.”

He also discovered extensive research work being carried out, with many universities offering courses for the study of land drainage.

Further travels led him to the Netherlands which has a well-established drainage industry for obvious reasons, and he found on his return to the UK that there was a demand for the information gleaned which he has continued to share with farmers.

From a business perspective, the most significant impact was the study’s influence on Farm Services’ move to GPS grade control.

“It is easier to set up than laser and once it is done there is no downtime from having to repeatedly move the laser,” he says.

“While there is not a huge difference on 200-500m projects, on bigger jobs the savings add up.”

More recently Mr Burtonshaw has taken the plunge of investing in a Mastenbroek 40/20i trencher, the first of its kind in England.

“This is drainage plough, a design that is used for the majority of the pipework done outside the UK,” he explains.

Versatile

“In the UK, we have stuck with the chain trencher design, mainly because it is more versatile, so could be used when our industry was forced to diversify into sports field and construction work in the 1990s.

“It is also more suitable for smaller jobs. But for larger contracts a plough can work at 4kph compared with 2kph. You can really move on in large fields.

“It is the one machine that helped us meet the demand that we saw this year.”

Software continues to develop at a pace and Trimble’s drainage add-on for the Farmworks package has proved a real asset.

“We use a compact tractor fitted with the Trimble display to survey the field, and can create many more survey points than would be possible manually,” Mr Burtonshaw says.

“We can add contour lines, watersheds and tributary lines which indicate where water flows, all of which can be viewed in 3D in the office or on a device in the field.

“This allows us to compare the survey with the actual view of the field, and the drainage plan is then simply downloaded into the plough which works on autosteer to follow the pattern.”

Traditional materials still rule, however.

Recycled backfill products are used where possible, but patchy supply means they cannot be relied on, and since plastic pipe replaced clay, it has remained the same, although mechanised handling of the reels on the biggest trenchers cuts manual effort.

Mr Burtonshaw is also following trials on improving water quality pioneered in research at Illinois State University, which he first learned about during the Nuffield scholarship era, and now beginning in the UK.

Nitrates

“The aim is to reduce nitrates present in drainage water and thus potentially entering the environment,” he says.

“This can be achieved simply and efficiently by filtering through bioreactors consisting of woodchip filled trenches at the outlet, and the UK trials aim to establish what the ideal particle size is for our drainage systems.

“It is cheap and long lasting and further enhances the green credentials of land drainage.

“While the carbon footprint of installation is high, the systems are long lasting and help to make better use of the land.”