Farmer Focus: Farm road maintenance means crushing shingle

Constant improvement sounds like a good concept, in theory. In practice, it’s a fine line between busy and chaotic.

We have decided that all our farm roads need a new layer of crushed shingle over them, and the cost of buying and carting in from a quarry was eye-watering.

So we decided, as we have done before, to bring in a shingle crushing contractor to make a stockpile that should last us a couple of years.

See also: How Canadian grower became Alberta’s first craft malthouse

About the author

David Clark

Farmer Focus writer

David Clark runs a 463ha fully irrigated mixed farm with his wife Jayne at Valetta, on the Canterbury Plains of New Zealand’s south island. He grows 400ha of cereals, pulses, forage and vegetable seed crops, runs 1,000 Romney breeding ewes and finishes 8,000 lambs annually.

Read more articles by David Clark

I’m digging the hole using our 15t excavator, and the contractor is loading the crusher and stacking the finished aggregate.

To my surprise, it takes a thousand digger bucket loads a day to feed the monster. I’m not getting much else done.

The plan had been to do this earlier in the year when we weren’t quite as busy.

Wet weather scuppered that idea, so we’re doing this project in the midst of spring drilling, delivering grain and processing the finishing lambs.

“Why did you think it was a good idea to do this job now?” is a question I’ve been asked more than once.

My three sons have chimed in and said, “that’s a huge mountain Dad. That’s going to be a lot of trailer loads for us to cart.”

I get a real sense of satisfaction out of these development and maintenance projects.

We are fully self-contained here at Valetta and have completed a huge amount of development work since we arrived in 1994, transforming a run-down, dryland sheep farm into a fully irrigated arable farm.

As a family we did not have the capital to buy the farm, or telephone the contractors and ask them to deliver a finished result.

We have chipped away with our own equipment, doing all the work ourselves as we grew the income base to fund it.

For us, that’s been our pathway, and looking back, there is great satisfaction in seeing the results.

But equally crushing is the mountain of shingle to be spread on all the lanes over the next year. It’s a sign we are still on the path of constant improvement.