Rowley McKinnon runs Mountford Berries, a 34-hectare farm in Australia that switched from sheep to supplying berries to supermarkets. The John Deere 5 Series tractors, especially the 5ML and 5EN models, handle narrow rows and come with autosteer and GPS for precision work. Operator Daniel says the cabin comfort and touchscreen make long days easier.
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I love working here on the farm. It's great to be able to come to work and walk around here. The 160, 170-odd people that we have working here on the farm have a career because of us, and we have a business because of them. It's quite a nice feeling that we're all working together to achieve supplying fresh berries for Australia. My name's Rowley McKinnon. I'm the manager of Mountford Berries. Yeah, 6 generations the McKinnons have been here. Typically, the property operated as a dryland sheep business. The farm Mountford is right near the town of Longford, and Longford's quite famous for its racing history. So we're currently standing at the Longford Viaduct. Which is a pretty iconic part of the old Longford racetrack. Back in the '60s, this was one of the circuits which all the famous racers like Brabham used to come here and compete. My grandfather Ronnie, he had quite a fair bit to do with the organising of all of the racing as well. So yeah, a little bit of history there. We started growing berries 12 years ago. We were looking for another way to diversify the business. And so we sort of jumped in headfirst really, and it was a very big learning curve and mistakes were definitely made. Over 12 years of growing, we have expanded. We started with 4 hectares and we're now up to nearly the completion of 34 hectares. So we use a major berry marketer to supply all the supermarkets. Yeah, typically they are sold up the eastern seaboard of Australia. In some cases though, if the market's right, we do go into South Australia and WA. Since we've started growing berries, we've relied more on John Deere to do the spraying and all the other work that we rely on the tractors to do. Also, when we're trying to control variables, machinery's really important as well. We need to be able to do farm operations reliably, on time. All the time, and John Deere do have an edge with reliability. We haven't had many issues with our tractors. If something does go wrong with them, they're generally fixed quite easily. The parts are quite available. The guys down in the local shop do a great job. John Deere have been really good to us.
Working with Rowley's been great. He's obviously trusting me a lot with obviously the knowledge that I've had with other operations. I think that Rowley's really enjoying the journey, and I going forward, it'll definitely make him a lot more efficient.
How are you finding the new tractor then?
Yeah, it's great. I haven't spent much time in it myself, but I'm sure if it's a John Deere, it's going to be nice and reliable.
Almost certainly.
Yeah, yeah.
So John Deere's 5 Series tractors are really being designed with our horticultural producers in mind. We've released a lot of new updates to the lineup the last couple of years, particularly with our 5ML that we released a few years ago and our 5EN, which we just re-released last year. One of the things we've really been prioritising for our hort producers is ensuring it can fit in narrow rows, so like we are here today in these blueberry rows. We understand that width is really important for these customers.
Yeah, so what we've got with the sprayer is we've been able to utilise the John Deere rate controller with ISOBUS, and he's been able to make it a lot easier for himself to be able to drive through the tunnels, being able to do it autosteer.
The operator who drives the ML, Daniel, he— I think he loves it. I think love would be the word. The boys are saying they can't get you out of this thing now.
Nah, I want to be in it all the time. Really, they don't see me much anymore because I'm always in this thing, honestly. But yeah, just the amount of room I've got in here, the big screen with the GPS systems, super easy, smooth, efficient. Absolutely love the AC, that's for sure.
The software that comes with the tractor and the systems behind it are going to be very advantageous to us. So it's really interesting and exciting to know that there's ways we can do that all integrated in the John Deere system that'll make life easier and more accurate for our suppliers, and it can streamline what we do and make everything simpler.
