Sprayers don’t come tougher than RoGator
19 June 2020
Greg Younghusband has been purchasing sprayers through Croplands since 2009. In that time he has run 10 Croplands sprayers, primarily RoGators.
“I have had them for a fair while. The first one I had was a RoGator 1286 and then I got the 1300A.
“I usually try to get 8000 hours out of them, but now I think we will push them out past 10,000 hours or until they wear out.
“We just know how to run RoGators and they are a very strong machine.”
His latest acquisition is the RoGator 1100C with a 120-ft boom. It joins the other self-propelled sprayers in his shed, a RoGator 1300A, two RoGator 1300Bs and a Spra-Coupe 7660.
Based in Curban, in the Gilgandra region of central New South Wales, Greg has contracts to spray 42,000 hectares of crops farms in a 250km radius from his home base.
Depending on the season, he can spray crops five or six times a year, hence the need for so many strong and reliable machines.
Greg says while the RoGators are not perfect, they have proven to be very reliable.
“Croplands has made massive improvements with the C Series. I don’t expect to have problems with hoses and the under carriage is a big improvement.
“There are guys out there who would say other brands are comparable, but I doubt any of them would say their gear is better. You can find faults in them all, but in my experience Croplands has the most reliable gear.
The bit I am looking for is the strength in the design and the RoGator booms are very strong. We give them absolute punishment and they handle it.
Greg Younghusband, Curban NSW
Greg says he drove the new RoGator 1100C for 250 hours in one fortnight recently and he didn’t get tired.
With his fleet of sprayers, Greg has half a dozen different sized booms to meet the varied needs of his clients. The RoGator 1100C has a 36.5m boom.
“We started out with little Brumby booms and built out from there.”
Greg and his wife Gai-Maree farm at Curban with their two daughters. The farming operation produces grain on 2100 ha.
They lease the cropping ground from Greg’s father, Neville, who oversees the day-to-day running of the farm when Greg is away with his contracting work.
The farm has been severely impacted by the drought over the last couple of years, but Greg is hopeful this season’s grain crop will be a healthy one to get the farm back on track.
Over the last 18 months Greg’s team of nine full-time workers has also been kept busy cutting and transporting close to 45,000 big square bales of hay from Victoria to farms in NSW and Queensland impacted by drought and fire as part of the state government’s relief effort.