Chapter 1: Are there farm-ready battery tractors available now?
Are there farm-ready battery tractors out there? Is there a way of bypassing the Straits of Hormuz on the way to the silage pit? When I suggested this on the programme last week to Francie Gorman and Dennis Drennan, we got a number of very sceptical texts, 51551, most of which said there was no way that an e-tractor would have the battery life that they needed for their farm.
Well, hang on to your charging sockets, people, because we've got news for you. Fent, one of the posher tractor brands about, think Mercedes if it was a car, has a 100 horsepower battery tractor that it says will do most jobs around the yard and a full day's work. on just a single charge, and it's going to be in showrooms in Ireland next month. You can buy it ex-factory right now, though.
There was one in Northampton in England yesterday afternoon, and Fent salesman Philip Matty took me for a virtual tour of it. I asked him, did he like it?
I absolutely love it. We've taken a product that we already have that's proven that we've been making for very many years. We've taken the engine out of it and put a battery and electric pack into it. So ultimately, we are diving into a new world, a new market. But as the product stands, it is so similar to the standard tractor. It's uncanny.
It's actually quite underwhelming demonstrating this tractor because it's the same as its brother.
So as you look around the cab that you're sitting in now, it really is no different to the diesel alternative?
Correct. Correct. So if you are a Fendt user, a Fendt driver and you've driven Fendt tractors before, there is absolutely no difference to driving this tractor to the other one. The only difference is, is you, of course, don't have to put diesel in or wait for the glow plug light to go out.
Will you open the cab door and just start up the engine so that we get some idea of how it sounds? Of course, of course. There you have it. Now, look, the big question amongst all of our listeners, and I'm sure it's the very first thing that everybody who comes to you is asking is, how long will the battery last?
That very much depends on the application you are doing with it. So we have some of these tractors out in the UK at the moment. Some of them are with turf growers and such like, where they are doing very, very light duty applications where they're not needing a lot of energy. So when you're in that application, you're not needing much energy. It will do a seven or eight hour day.
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Chapter 2: How does the Fendt battery tractor compare to diesel alternatives?
That is a lot of money for a 100 horsepower tractor.
Obviously, there's been a lot of research, a lot of development gone into this. Obviously, buying the battery is a lot more of an investment than buying the diesel engine. So hence the retail price of this machine.
In the conversations that you're having with farmers, I mean, they're obviously very keenly aware of how much money they're spending on diesel typically in Ireland right now, a hundred cow operation will be spending nine or maybe 10,000 euro a year on the current prices. Quite previously, they would have been spending about 5,000 euro a year.
With that sort of baseline to continuing to run a diesel tractor in mind, are people convincing themselves, those that you're talking to, that this is a clever hedge, a clever thing to do now?
Absolutely. And it's not just a diesel price thing. You know, farmers across the UK and Ireland are being targeted on reducing their emissions for milk production. Well, this this is also a way of doing that. You know, if you have access to solar panels or wind energy, you know,
and you can charge this tractor off of that, then you are bringing your emissions level down, which obviously then results in an incentive for the people going for milk contracts and things like that.
Philip Matty in Northampton. Well, that is good in so far as it goes, but it is very expensive and it won't be any use in the fields doing silage cutting, ploughing, slurry spreading and so on. But there is a battery powered answer to both of those questions coming up a little bit later on in the programme.
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