Cutting around 10,000 acres of grass for customers around north Wales and Anglesey, Simon Jones Contracting based at Cemaes Bay takes full advantage of Vicon’s three-bladed disc.
“We face some very abrasive grass in this part of the country, and having the extra blade on each disc means that we don’t need to change blades so often,” explains Simon Jones. “That keeps downtime to a minimum.”
His latest mower purchase is a Vicon EXTRA 7100T Vario, from local dealer DJS Hydraulics & Agri. Specification includes isobus control, 9.8-10.2m cutting width and QuattroLink suspension, all working in combination with an EXTRA 732FT. It is one of three mowing outfits in use with Mr Jones’s contracting operation, and joins a smaller Vicon triple and a Vicon 6m front/rear mo-co combination.
“When the weather is right, we need to drop a lot of acres in a short amount of time to get adequate wilt and stay ahead of our two self-propelled foragers,” he says. “The 7100T gives us that capacity, and despite it’s working width, it is a very agile, manoeuvrable and straightforward machine to operate.”
Equipped with isobus, the 7100T can be effortlessly handled on Mr Jones’ New Holland T7.315 through the in-cab Intelliview monitor, or with a smaller Valtra T174 using an IsoMatch Tellus Pro dual screen terminal.
“I like the flexibility we have with tractor power and workload,” he says. “Either tractor can handle the 7100T triple – horsepower choice comes down to what crop volume we’re cutting and the level of output we want to achieve.”
“The quality of cut we get is impressive,” he says. “And the level of back-up from our local dealer is brilliant.”
He reckons his biggest challenges are field sizes.
“If we’re lucky, we’ll be working in a 20-acre field, but we can easily find ourselves in a three-acre field too,” he says. “And this makes high capacity kit even more beneficial to us – we can easily lose time travelling, plus folding and unfolding, so having generous plenty of output at our fingertips makes my business all the more efficient.”
April 2020