Simon Parrish with his Knight C-Type cultivator.

FROM a modest start when he took over Kingston Pasture Farm, at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, from his father 10 years ago, Simon Parrish has built up a sizeable contracting business that has required some major changes to his machinery fleet to keep pace with a growing contract acreage on top of his own 60ha.
Last year DC Parrish and Son combined 1,700ha and cultivated 2,100ha. With another contract being added to the list this year, the 2010 cultivation figure is likely to be more than 2,200ha.
Two years ago the growing amount of cultivation work prompted a fresh look at the equipment used by the company, with the aim of increasing productivity and reducing as much work as possible to one-pass operations. In addition, the new equipment had to be able to get good results on a wide variety of soil types, from black fen land to heavy clay.
After much deliberation, the solution that Mr Parrish opted for was a 6m C-Type multi-purpose cultivator from Knight Farm Machinery, based at South Luffenham, Rutland.
The C-Type is the largest of three families of machines developed by Knight to provide highly versatile cultivation performance through the inclusion of detachable tool-beams, quick-change Speed-Loc points and easy depth adjustment. When discs are included, they are individually rubber-mounted, and tines are protected either by shear-bolts or an automatic hydraulic re-set system.
The C-Type presses have four tool-beams. To meet Mr Parrish's requirements, Knight supplied his machine with a single row of 610mm diameter discs, together with scrapers, at the front, followed by two rows of rigid tines with Speed-Loc points and a row of 12 deep-loosening tines on extended legs. This arrangement provides progressive cultivation that reduces draft loading on the tractor. At the rear are two rows of 75mm-wide press rings, with Knight's well-known shouldered design, spaced at 260mm.
The machine was used for a full season last year, and Mr Parrish was impressed with its performance and versatility. With a Terracast seeder unit mounted on top and some of the tines removed to reduce soil working, oilseed rape was generally drilled in a single pass, while wheat and beans were drilled in one pass with all the tools in position.
On one occasion the machine moved straight from drilling rape to pressing ploughed land. The finish produced after the plough is much better than he used to achieve with previous presses, according to Mr Parrish.
"We needed a bigger machine to cope with the acreage we are working on now, but we also needed a press so that we could do as much work as possible in one pass," he said. "We have found the C-Type is even more versatile than I thought it would be. We seem to be able to use it for anything.
"The two rows of press rings at the back are very effective, particularly for rape. They make a finer, more-level seed bed than we used to get with our other machinery, and we get better establishment as a result."
Mr Parrish specified a height-adjustable hydraulic drawbar to provide depth control, and because of the size of the machine he also opted to have the transport wheels in the centre, rather than at the back, to make it more manoeuvrable round corners and through gateways.