Nathan Claxton runs Bardon Farms in Queensland, a 250-acre operation growing over 20 vegetable varieties year-round. The farm switched to John Deere equipment over the past decade, using AutoTrac guidance to reduce compaction and harvest time, and JDLink telematics to cut idle time and fuel use.
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It's pretty rewarding. You think there's a fair chance everyone in Queensland's had something that's grown off this farm on their plate at one time in their life. My name's Nathan Claxton. I'm the National Farming Manager for Bardon Farms. Bardon Farms is a family-owned farming business. We've transitioned from being a produce broker in the late '70s into a farming operation now. This farm in particular is about 250 acres, and we've got about 2 hectares of greenhouses and hydroponics under netting as well. In this ghat inside here, we grow brassicas, like cabbage behind us here, cauliflower, red cabbage as well, lettuces. We grow multiple herbs in greenhouses and Asian vegetables. We supply supermarkets 363 days a year. So I think it's Easter Monday and Christmas Day we get off, but we're back to work Boxing Day. So people gotta eat, we've gotta supply. We've got over 20 different varieties and species we grow, so it is quite complicated. You see in there, he's a bit more mature. There's not much room for him to grow left in there, so he'd be ready in probably a day or two, I think, for us. Probably the biggest complexity for us is trying to keep things under control. We've got many sites, many operations. He's over there doing this, I'm over here doing this. How do you make sure we're on the same page? And we're always striving to sort of produce the best we can, so try and keep that consistent is the hard part. And we're going to try and keep our teams all sort of aligned as things go through. Throw in a couple storms wet weather. We're on black soil here, it's quite heavy, so we get a couple weeks of rain, you can't do much. We plant 26 times a season. We've got 8 different farms we do the same thing to, so just trying to keep things rolling. And essentially the Australian population want food every day in the shelves, so we've got to try and produce it every day to a very consistent form. Across the season we'd have over 100 harvest staff. The branch and the brand that come out and see us, educate the guys on the tractors, happy to spend some time on the phone if we've got something broken or we press the wrong button. Which happens sometimes with our mixed workforce. If we're trying to get a harvest window out with upcoming rain or a storm or whatever, we've got to work day and night to get it done. If it's broken down, we can't do it. For example, we had a flush of cauliflower last week. We picked 4 weeks of stock in a week. We're working big hours. Machines don't work, we don't work, the stuff gets out of size, we can't sell it. So cauliflowers have got to sort of be 130 to 160 millimetres. That could be a day's growth. If you miss it, it's pig food. We sort of progressed from other brands to John Deere the last sort of 8 to 10 years. I've clicked very well with Ben. It's when I first met him and we just started talking, in particular about a spray tractor. We thought of using an old tractor and putting a GreenStar in there to autosteer. Ben was very helpful and was happy to sort of go either way. Yes, I said, well, cool, decision made. I went with the green one.
Nathan and I have had a pretty good relationship for the last 6 years, I think, we've been dealing together. And he's always looking towards what's next and what we can do and what he can do in the future to help him grow and to be a more efficient business. So it's been a real pleasure.
Quite a big fan of John Deere gear now. We run a lot of 6 Series John Deeres. It's pretty bulletproof. Reliability for us is very, very good. It just keeps going.
This 6M we picked, Nathan came to me, he said, "I'm ordering a cabbage harvester, I need a variable transmission that will allow to adjust our speed to help the cabbage fly up the harvester." And at that stage, the new 6M had not been long released, and having the ability to have an IVT transmission in the 6M130 was right after what he was looking for. And it gives them that ability now that they can adjust their speed on the go and make sure that they're harvesting the best produce possible. It's versatility. This tractor, it's 130 horsepower with, and it has IPM available as well for those heavier jobs, but also having the customisability of the tractor, like the wide transmission options available. Like they're a very operator-friendly machine and yeah, moving forward, it's, anyone can get into it and drive it, so.
This farm's progressed the latest this year to AutoTrac and it's been helping us a lot with the cabbage here with this new harvester. If we have them dead straight with the AutoTrac, back, it harvests a lot better and faster, so saves us money there as well. Ground compaction, diesel usage, that sort of stuff is definitely a big winner for us.
The Operations Center and JDLink, that has been an absolute game changer for them, and the large accrual of idle time is one thing that we could, you know, we could significantly save.
Yeah, it's all on OpsCenter. We can actually see the hours. I get a report every Monday now that says that X tractor, so the spray tractor, spent 80% of its time 20% of its time idling, so it's been very handy for us. Since we've come on with John Deere, our productivity and our performance has improved. We're doing better and we're understanding how to farm better. And we're quite concentrated on maybe crop health or this or that, but not so much what's under the bonnet or how that works and how to get the most out of that tractor. And they've helped educate us and our staff on how that works.
From where we've come from to where we are, I think, you know, the next 10 years in horticulture is going to be, you know, quite amazing. Yeah, it'll be very exciting to see.
