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https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YndpZQVQpM4
Seems like a revenue raising exercise dressed up as an environmental improvement. The regulations are cumbersome and must be welcomed by the lovers of bureaucracy! We can use red to cut roadside hedges but if we enter the grounds of a non agricultural property to cut the other side we must use white! How many contractors are going to run two separate tractors to comply?!!!
As usual the faceless jobsworths in Whitehall are so far detached from running a business they churn out these regulations with little thought on their consequences.
Don't start me on plant passports!!
I've been trying to read around this on various government pages, and 2 things have become apparent:
1) they're getting paid by the page, and 2) whoever wrote it doesn't know what horticulture is.
I'm none the wiser as to whether or not I can put red diesel in my ride-on mower, so I think safest to assume I can't.
Two points. My sub-contractor with his Ransomes 2250 will continue with red diesel. He can still bulk buy it, so it’s readily available.
He told me that last year it was 54p plus vat. More recently it was 79p plus vat and that he had failed to order any then and that just a couple of week later when he did order some, it was £1.10 plus vat.
But now red diesel is more than white. I was told last week by a farmer friend [prices may have changed since then] that red diesel is now hovering between £1.45 and £1.60 plus vat. The red suppliers are taking advantage of the current fuel price situation.
So to fill one of his tractors has jumped from about £125 to about £250.
Fertilizer has gone from about two hundred and fifty pounds to over nine hundred pounds per tonne.
The Ukraine is where most bread making wheat comes from.
So milling wheat is now about £350 per tonne. Expect bread to hit three or four pounds per loaf.
Around forty years ago I worked as a carpenter for a Building Contractor doing up the stables at Worcester Racecourse, I was there for around four months and sat with the lads who worked permanently at the race course in their canteen for breaks throughout the day and became quite familiar with what happened on the racecourse on a daily basis.
Back then the race course was under the direct control of the City Council who employed the staff and owned all the machinery required.
One day the were two identical little grey Fergie tractors parked up in the yard, one was based at the racecourse and registered as an agricultural vehicle costing £7 a year and was run on red diesel, the other was used by the parks department and was driven around the city to various parks, it was registered as a commercial vehicle at a far higher cost and was run on white diesel.
If I remember correctly there was a seven mile limit on agricultural tractors before they had to be taxed, they could only be driven up seven miles from where they were based and only to collect hay, straw, etc that would be used as stock feed and bedding on the farm where they were based.
Any more than seven miles and they had to be registered, but the mileage was still limited. Our neighbours bought a potato harvester and drove about sixty miles to collect it using a tractor that had their name, address and “Agricultural Contractors” sign written on both sides of the bonnet. They were stopped by the police, handed a penalty notice and fined, then made to hire a low loader to get both the tractor and potato harvester back home.
Roll on forty years to the present day, farmers tractors are now huge compared to grey Fergies and a hell of a lot faster, there’s farmers driving all over the country doing collections and deliveries that forty years ago they would have been expected to hire a transport contractor to do using a fully taxed commercial vehicle running on white diesel and realistically needed to do do because the tractors weren’t up to the job.
How a lot of farmers have been taxing their tractors, what they have been using them for and what fuel they have been running them on has been a “bit doubtful” for a long time if subjected to close scrutiny, even driving between two farms owned by the same farmers can possibly be illegal using an untaxed tractor, as can using red diesel to do so even if the tractor is taxed.
However large construction plant may never ever go on a public road, but will now have to use white diesel despite not having to be taxed. It does beg the question how much this is going to add to the cost of construction projects, the amount it must be adding to the cost of HS2 must be phenomenal.
Exempted large goods vehicles
goods vehicle, other than an agricultural motor vehicle, which is used:
only for purposes relating to agriculture, horticulture or forestry
on (public roads) only in passing between areas of land occupied by the same person
in passing between any two such areas does not travel a distance exceeding 1.5 kilometres on public roads
1.5 kilometres isn’t even a mile, making hiring a low loader or having a big trailer a necessity for some machinery.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/agricultural-vehicle-licences-and-fuel
There’s also the requirements for an Operators Licence for tractors to consider:
The most likely exemptions from operator licensing for tractor owners are if the tractor:
Around thirty years ago I worked for a guy who owned a saw mill, he bought a Matador timber tractor, we were based just down the road from the local DVLA office ( back in the days when they had them) and said he was “just going to pop in and sort the road tax out for the Matador”, he really wasn’t a happy man when he came back.
Our neighbour who got into trouble with the police over the potato harvester learnt to fly and started an aerial crop spraying business, he bought a secondhand Ford A-series County 4x4 fire tender to use as a service and rescue truck, when he wasn’t allowed to tax it as a tractor he put it through as a mobile crane, that didn’t go down well with the DVLA when they realised what he had done, neither did running it on red diesel.