Straight Talking, David Lemon and Darren Palin, D L Lemon Wilton Limited

We sat down with Managing Director David Lemon and Lead Operator Darren Palin to talk about their relationship with Bateman, in particular how they have developed their Bateman sprayer to carry out multiple duties.   

What Bateman sprayer do you run?

DP: “An RB55 which is a 2020 model. It’s got a 40-metre boom, five thousand, six hundred litre tank and a fast fill centrifugal pump to give us faster filling on liquid fertilizer, satellite tanks and bigger output in the field.”

How long have you been running Bateman sprayers?

DP: “The first Bateman, a Hi Lo, arrived on the farm in 1990. We snuck into the Smithfield show with the cleaners. Peter Lemon, who was running the business back then, went around every sprayer manufacturer, all of whom told him why they were better than Bateman. He then went to see Richard Bateman and told him why all the other manufacturers thought their products were better than his. Peter left the show having bought a Bateman sprayer.”

DL: “There was a self-propelled sprayer with a sprayer on and a self-propelled sprayer with a drill on. We liked the idea of being able to use one machine for two purposes, especially when you look at the ridiculousness of spending nearly a million pounds on a combine harvester that gets used for eight weeks of the year. Here was an opportunity to use a machine for seed fert and spray, all our variable costs tied up in one machine.” 

DP: “Since the Hi Lo we’ve changed our sprayer every four to five years. We’ve had a 2001, followed by an RB15, an RB25 and we're now on our fourth RB55.”

The Bateman fulfils a number of different roles on this farm. Can you expand on that?

DP: “Obviously it does all the spraying, liquid fertilizing, which we can convert from spray to liquid fertilizer. The flick of a button in the cab changes the filters to compensate. There's no messing about changing things, just go from one to the other, which means we can do fertiliser in the morning, if need be, until the spraying conditions allow and then just drop straight back onto spraying. The 5,600-litre tank gives us the opportunity to go up to 70 hectares per tank load at various water volumes. 

“Then we have the option to take off the sprayer, put on a spinner to do granule fertilizers. It only takes 15-minute turnaround with two people, half an hour if I’m on my own. It’s the same to change over to the seed drill. We’ve turned the sprayer into a self-propelled seed drill, which is an original solo drill manufactured by Bateman around 1998 and modified in conjunction with Bateman. I drew a basic design on an Excel spreadsheet, took it to Jason Bateman who converted it into a CAD design and gave us a file.”

DL: “We're forced to drill later with the pressures of Blackgrass and wet Autumns, which, unfortunately, seems to be the norm. We’re able to go out in much wetter conditions using the fourth generation of more or less the same drill. When we moved to the RB55, we went to a 40-meter boom and married that up with an eight-meter drill, because we had the extra horsepower to pull that size of drill.” 

What efficiencies has multiple use of the RB55 provided? 

DL:” To convert our old drill to eight metres cost around £30,000. To buy an eight-meter drill you're talking six figures, you're also probably adding another tractor to the fleet. If you think of the Bateman as a tractor, it’s busier than any other tractor on the farm and is earning me money every day, it’s a profit centre. Whereas other tractors standing idle are cost centres. 

“You've got to be quite organised. It’s a huge benefit when the same person puts the tram lines in for the drill and the sprayer. So, you've doubled down straight away. You know the order in which you drilled it, so you know the order in which you're going to have to spray things.  

“We've streamlined all of our processes. When Darren’s drilling we’ve designed a hopper with a trap door in the bottom. We put two tons of seeds in, he pulls up in the corner of the field when he is empty and in around 30 seconds, we refill using the loader and he’s ready to go again. 

“You've got a very light machine drilling at 12 kilometres an hour. You can be six or eight or 10 metres with it and you can cover an awful lot of acres in a day. And it's not horrendously expensive to do.  

“When Darren is spraying, most of the time I will be back at the farm, I’ll have the mix ready using a 5,000 litre a minute pump. In five and a half minutes, he's got the next load on and he's on his way back to the field.”

As a sprayer only do you find the RB55 economical to run?

DL: “If we are pushed and the weather's been against us, with the RB55 we've spread a thousand acres in a day with it, which is a seriously long day. Recently, we had about 600 acres of rust, we treated it in one day, no problem at all. 

“Historically, we’d split the spraying duties between a Bateman and a 24-metre trailed sprayer, which was in the region of a 70 / 30 workload in favour of the Bateman. When we moved to the 40-metre boom we dispensed with the trailed sprayer and a tractor, so we saved a fair chunk there. In terms of other efficiencies, there's even the argument that the fewer tram lines you have, the more yield you're going to make.”

DP: “Echoing what David said, we're on top of it so much these days because of the size of the machine and the width we’re spraying at. It's more than capable of handling everything that we throw at it. I might add that it's got everything the driver needs – comfort and all-around visibility. It's a nice place to spend a day when you need to be in there for up to 18 hours at a time.”

How has the RB55 travelled when spraying on difficult ground conditions? 

DL: “We've got some steep banks that will test a lot of machines. Add green sand, that can be bottomless, clay and chalk escarpments into the mix, the RB55 climbs up everything without too much bother.

“You see other self-propelled sprayers on the roads that just look clumsy. They're huge with the same or even less capacity. And that's the thing I find so strange, it's almost like they want the muscle, but they don't want the output. We don't get as many spray days as we used to, but if you can get on and get more done in a day, then why on earth wouldn't you?”

DP: “I can adjust the axles with a flick of a button in the cab. So, when we do get onto a bank that requires a bit of leaning to one side, I can go out wider to compensate. The larger tyres also help to make the RB55 a very stable machine.  

“I would say the weight distribution on the RB55 is pretty much the same as on the RB15 and RB25, which must be 50 / 50. The ground compaction has probably stayed similar to what it would've been back in the day with the Hi Lo, which is very impressive when you look at the increase in the size of machine.”

What do you think of the backup provided by Bateman? 

DL: “I would say it's first class. They know their machines inside out. It’s quite amazing because they can guide you through such a lot over the phone, we only need a fitter as a last resort. If they say there’ll be an engineer here at quarter to eight the next morning, a Bateman van is on the drive at the given time. We’re governed by daylight; Bateman’s engineers can sometimes arrive at unsociable hours, but importantly, they stay until the job’s done.”

DP: “Ordering parts is very easy. Again, they know exactly what part you’re talking about when you phone and say: ‘I want this thing which is behind that thing that's on top of the other thing.’ In most cases the part is here the next day and it’s always spot on in terms of what we wanted.” 

How would you describe your partnership with Bateman?

DL: “Our relationship is a very good one, it’s very strong. I think in part that’s down to Jason's willingness to have a go. Darren knows what he wants and we'll discuss it at length with Jason because we’ll need an idea of how to do it. It's been an amazing experience to watch how these ideas come to life.” 

DP: “Jason will quite often send me a picture on his phone with circles on a piece of cardboard, we’ll look at this, discuss it, bounce ideas around and that's generally the way it works. There’s a mutual respect between us, we all want the same thing - a machine going up and down every day with 5,000 hours on it and as reliable as it was the day it arrived.”

DL: “It's a premium product. The quality, service and backup, you know what you're going to get. For me, losing a spraying day is like having a combine broken down on the only sunny day in August. We've got to be on it. Our partnership with Bateman gives us confidence the acres we've got to cover are going to be covered.” 

In your opinion what sets Bateman apart? 

DL: “The comprehensive knowledge of the machine by everybody who works there. Because we're slightly different and we drill with it, there are things that we've had on our machine that no other people will want. It’s that flexibility to understand what we’re trying to achieve and then make it happen. “ 

DP:” During 1995, my first year in the Hi Lo, I went to do some contracting on a different farm. They had different tramline widths which were all over the place. I went in and trying to travel in those ruts the axles just snapped. We got it back here on somebody's low loader. Jason Bateman arrived and spent the whole night rejigging and rewelding it. Peter Lemon gave Jason his breakfast the following morning and packed him off back to Devon. The sprayer was fixed and ready to go.”