How a farm machinery hire scheme can save you money
Farming is expensive. You need to buy breeding stock, feed for your animals and seeds for your crops. Then you have to maintain all of the kilometres of fencing around your fields, keep your crops watered and take care of sick animals. All if this costs a lot of money – and we haven’t even got to the equipment yet!
A farm machinery hire scheme means that you don’t need to buy all of the expensive equipment that is required to successfully run an agriculture business. Rather than paying huge sums upfront for things like tractors, sprayers and ditchers, hiring the machines from someone else in your community saves you a lot of money and still lets you get the job done.
Listing the farm machinery you already own for hire can also help you to recoup some of the costs of buying it in the first place. Renting your equipment to other local farmers can help you to put a bit of extra cash in your pocket, as well as putting it to good use when you don’t need it.
Getting a group of farmers together for a farm machinery hire scheme is the logical extension of putting these ideas together. If each person buys one piece of equipment, then all of you can rent your machines to each other, both reducing your initial outlay and keeping a bit of money coming in as other people need your equipment!
Renting from fellow farmers also means that you can be sure the farm machinery you hire will be in good working order, and adequate for the task at hand. Rather than relying on someone who has a warehouse full of equipment to know what works properly, you will be dealing with people who use the machine regularly themselves.
As long as you keep your own machines in good working order you can make a fair bit of money yourself, which can help to defray the costs of buying new farm equipment. Of course, heavier use is going to mean that your machines will need to be replaced more frequently, but the extra money should more than make up for the expenses.
Your community generally will also not need as many machines if you all hire your equipment from each other. Rather than each farm needing its own seeder, tiller, sprayer and harvester, for example, you will only need enough of each to let everyone have a turn with them.
Obviously you can’t be just perpetually rotating them because that’s not how growing seasons work, but as long as you time it so that you don’t all need the same machine at once you will save money between you.
As a side note on the money saving front, what you spend on farm machinery hire can be claimed as a tax deduction. Less machines also means lower maintenance costs overall, and fewer customers will mean that manufacturers have to work harder and offer better deals to get whoever in your community is buying (say) the new tractor to buy from them rather than a competitor.
Apart from the money you can both make and save, a farm machinery hire scheme can also help to bring your community together. If everybody is using each other’s equipment then you will all have a vested interest in maintaining community bonds, as well as helping to fix the shared machines.
Renting the equipment you need from others in your community, and hiring out your own machines when you aren’t using them, is a fantastic way to both save money on equipment costs and make a bit of extra cash.