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* More large-scale growers turning to second-hand
* Aim is to cut spend on high-horsepower tractors
* How did a used Challenger perform over the seasons?
* When Oxfordshire farmers Alan and Richard Smith more than doubled their farming area to 1,000ha two years ago, they went in search of a prime mover that could handle all cultivation and drilling duties.
Having already lined up a 5m Simba SL, 5m Vaderstad Carrier and 6m Vaderstad Rapid drill, they reckoned they would need at least 300hp to pull them through their heavy clay ground.
Top of the initial shopping list was Fendt's 330hp 936 and its bigger brother, the 939. The appeal was that both of these tractors could muster up more than 300hp and be used all year, rather than having to be parked up after drilling.
But the problem was the price tag. When they were on the hunt for tidy low-houred machines, the only decent-looking models on the market were selling for about £120,000.
Even though this was a lot less than the new list price, they couldn't make the figures stack up, particularly as they didn't have a machine to trade in against it.
With Fendt out of the question, the father-and-son team started looking at second-hand crawlers and found that similarly powered machines were roughly half the price of the Fendt.
After bidding on an immaculate Challenger MT765C, which ended up going for "silly" money, they found a 2005 first-generation machine for sale with their local dealer Lister Wilder.
This had clocked up 4,400 hours and was on well-worn tracks, but was otherwise in very tidy condition. They ended up buying it for £60,000 and it arrived on the farm in the summer of 2014. We found out how it was getting on after three season's worth of work.
Why did you go for a Challenger?
* We thought a big artic crawler would be too heavy and clumsy, so that put the Quadtrac out of the question, even though you can pick second-hand ones up for similar money.
That left us with John Deere and Challenger, but we decided to go for the latter as we get on really well with the guys at Lister Wilder in Cirencester...