Hay Fever

Both Judge and jury – in other words, T&D’s editor – come up with the verdict that PJI’s flaming red Scania R620 is a suitable agricultural firm’s flagship and a worthy candidate for this month’s star truck

As the British summer draws to a close, the agricultural industry busies itself harvesting from England’s 3.8 million hectares of arable farmland, providing the nation’s dinner tables with everything from carrots for stews to flour for bread. In the UK our celebration of the Harvest Festival can be traced back to pagan times.

Held close to the appearance of the Harvest Moon, the festival celebrates the gathering and gatherers of all crops, not least combine harvesters, which by late September have chomped their way through enough wheat, oats, barley and oilseed rape to see us through to the following year. But the story doesn’t end there.

A bi-product is the dried stems of the crop. As it’s of limited nutritional value, the harvesting farmer has two choices: he can either leave the waste straw to be ploughed back into the field, or bale it to be used for a plethora of applications. The industry estimates 40% is incorporated back into the earth, leaving the remaining 60% to be used for anything from animal bedding to compost and biomass energy generation.

Hay, on the other hand, is the slightly more simple cut and dried rye-grass or meadow grass, used as winter fodder for grazing animals such as cattle, horses, goats and sheep. We know women of the night are regarded as ‘the oldest profession’, but hay and straw dealing can’t be far behind…

Hold up a map of the UK and, as a general rule, you have arable crops to your right and animals to your left (and horses everywhere). This presents an opportunity for premium hay and straw merchants such as Philip Judge International (PJI) and haulage contractors alike.

Five-truck fleet