The weather may have made this harvest difficult but farmers increased their co-operation to cope. As a result, the country’s largest machinery and labour sharing organisation surged to new record turnover figures.
Ringlink managing director, Graham Bruce, told members this week, that turnover of the 2,300 member strong organisation, had risen 25% over the past year and had now reached £25 million.
“The testing harvest we have just come through has proven the value of the Ring system. Without the flexibility and ability to transfer resources through a large area which Ringlink has, the harvest would have been much more difficult for individual members.
“During the period of most demand, we were moving combines and balers from areas where harvest was well through to parts of the countryside where a great deal of the crop still had to be harvested.”
Now in its twentieth year of operation, Ringlink membership covers the area east of a line from Inverness to Perth, from its head office in Laurencekirk.
Chairman, Mark Ogg, said the Ring system also played an important role in removing uncertainty from farmers’ financial concerns with a guaranteed payment 28 days after work had been invoiced. Significantly, in those credit crunching times, it also allowed farmers to reduce their capital costs through the sharing of machinery.
Coping with the demands of the wet season was made easier by the increased capacity of some of the combines now available. Mr Bruce said the big problem the Ring had faced in the past year had been a shortage of labour.
“Often it was possible to get a combine but the farmer said he could not spare a man to drive it. This shortage of labour has been creeping up on the industry for some time now and it now looms over everything we do.”
The shortage of workers was not just in the skilled sector involving tractor and combine drivers. Mr Bruce referred to increasing problems with sourcing workers for jobs at the lower end of the skills scale.
Ringlink’s subsidiary company that deals with labour supply Mearns and Angus Services Ltd, (MASL) now had an average of 80 employees working full time and this would peak at 140 at peak periods, but this workforce was still not sufficient to cope with demand.
Mr Bruce was critical of Angus Council for making it more difficult for farmers to house migrant workers in static caravans on farms. The local authority is now requiring farmers to licence these premises in order to regulate them.
“A tightening up has been necessary,” Mr Bruce admitted, “But the proposed requirements are just crazy. They will only licence a site if there are five caravans so how does the farmer who only wants a couple of workers cope with that.
“They also do not want caravans to be away from the workplace but the whole farm is a workplace. So that is impossible.”
He appealed for a commonsense set of practical guidelines to be set out so that standards would apply and for those conditions to be based on practicalities and not just theory.
In recent years, Ringlink has increasingly taken on a role of supplying commodities to its membership and Mr Bruce indicated that the co-op were looking at expanding from their present main supplies of fuel, fertilisers and straw into agricultural chemicals.