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.
ROCK BOTTOM
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 improving farm land into top grade arable grazing, from what had previously been dismissed as simply “65 hectares of rock”.
Quarter Century
Although Dei Owen Plant has been a familiar sight throughout the Anglesey area for the past 24 years, the company diversified in impressive style earlier this year with the purchase of the Clegyrog farm at Rhosgoch. “My neighbours thought I had gone mad,” Dei 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. 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. The granite, was then crushed using the Dig A Crusher 900 bucket which is carried on a Caterpillar 322DL . 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 was used in a concrete mix for the base of three new barns 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” says Owen, “Producing 30 tonnes each of 25 mm and 75 mm product an hour, it took just three days to crush enough rock for the barn bases. 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 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. 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 for grazing. 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. Now 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 farm to showcase his ideas to neighbours and 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. 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.”
He concluded. “We will certainly buy more. There is definitely a huge demand for this type of ‘green’ product. In this economic climate, profits are tight and any method of reducing overheads is worth investigating. The Dig A Crusher products have been a real find, as they have suddenly opened up the possibility of cost effectively dealing with waste and turning it into a cash product - on site.
“This reduces lorry movements, skip hire and the cost of mobile crusher hire. The introduction of the Dig A Screeners this year, has been little short of a stroke of genius. Not only can you crush demolition waste but you can clean, sort and recycle it as well, using your existing excavator – just brilliant.”
