This article is an extract from our Collective Machine Ownership Guide. If you are looking into the collective ownership of seed processing machinery, you can find a more detailed breakdown of the process Llafur Ni undertook, and a series of consideration questions to support you in your explorations, here: So You Want to Start a Machinery Ring?
Interest is peaking across UK agroecological farming networks to share machinery. It makes sense. As agroecological growers are squeezed harder each year by unpredictable climatic conditions and the industrialised food system, there has never been a better time to pool resources. Why spend a fortune on a piece of equipment you might only use a couple of times per year when it could be shared with others? For some individual growers, the purchase of new machinery to help them scale up their production is simply unattainable. But by forming a machinery ring with other growers, purchase costs can be shared and grants accessed.
Machinery rings are not a new concept. Stories of the past reveal that UK farmers used to not only help one another out in the fields on harvest days and at times of crisis, they also shared their equipment with their neighbours. In a time when geographical community was stronger, the sharing of machinery was far more commonplace. Nowadays, machinery rings have been formed to formalise these sharing arrangements, often facilitating machinery sharing across a wider area, between farmers who do not already know one another over the field fence.
In the UK, we have several large machinery rings, used by conventional farmers looking for kit such as combine harvesters, large seed drills, chemical sprayers and haulage trailers. Lincolnshire Machinery Ring has 550 members across the Midlands. Pembrokeshire Machinery Ring has over 800 members across Wales. The Association of Scottish Machinery Rings lists 9 machinery rings across the East Coast of Scotland. These machinery rings work well to serve their members’ needs, often facilitating buyers’ groups for the collective purchase of fertilisers, animal feed or fuel.
Cooperation is key for supporting farmers in the agroecological movement. This can be seen across the globe. The French Cuma cooperatives have been running for over 80 years, with over 9,000 farmer-led cooperatives on their books. They explicitly state they are here to support small – medium scale farms, many organic, many agroecological. During recent wildfires in France, the Cuma cooperative mobilised to use their machinery to spread water and build firebreaks, citing mutual aid and solidarity as their motivation.
Machinery rings can also extend to machinery specific for seed production. This can work especially well when machinery is only needed once per year, at harvest time. Farmfolk Cityfolk in Canada have developed three mobile seed processing trailers, each equipped with an array of seed cleaning tools, including hand screens, an air separator, a Clipper office tester, threshers, the famous Luterra winnow wizard and more. Moving shared machinery around allows farmers to reduce the mileage that their crops have to travel, while still sharing much-needed resources.
In my work as the Wales Coordinator for the Seed Sovereignty Programme, we are seeing a surge in interest in setting up machinery rings. In Wales, we facilitate the Llafur Ni collective, a group of farmers and seed diversity enthusiasts working together to revive rare Welsh oats. When we started our journey to revive oat diversity in 2018, we had no idea of the processing issues ahead of us. The oats we work with – varieties such as the ceirch du (black oat), Hen Gardie, Radnoreshire Sprig and ceirch llywd (grey oat) – are all hulled. With no oat mills left in Wales, we discovered that we had no way to dehull our oats for human consumption. We would need to obtain our own equipment in order to get our oats onto Welsh plates.
Following many years of research into small-scale solutions for oat processing (and the commissioning of a special tiny oat collider in order to dehull the oats for taste tests), we came to the conclusion that we needed to start purchasing collectively owned machinery. We were lucky enough to win a micro grant from the Kreitman Foundation (facilitated by the Seed Sovereignty Programme), allowing us to address this bottleneck by purchasing a collectively owned grain cleaner.
We hope that our experiences, the challenges we encountered and solutions we devised, will go some way towards helping other groups navigate the world of machinery rings. Our tale is summarised below, and detailed in full for those it may be useful for in an accompanying guide.
Read our full guide on collective machine ownership.
Until recently, our group was very focused on the growing of oats and knew very little about the equipment needed to process them. We began to informally research what we would need to do, quickly discovering that the information we needed was not readily available.
The main issue with identifying the machines we needed was scale. Because we were growing on a small scale – having everything from a few kilos to a few tonnes of our various rare oats – we were sitting in an unusual niche. While smaller-scale traditional oat mills would have matched our scale perfectly, they had all sadly fallen into ruin. Larger-scale commercial oat processing plants exist in Crewe and Scotland, serving the UK’s larger-scale oat producers. But we simply didn’t have the quantities to run through these large production lines. With no one operating at a comparable scale to us, it was very difficult to understand what machines we were even looking for!
Our research phase took many years of informal conversations, tapping into alternative grain networks and putting the exposing question out there – “we don’t know how to do this!”. We emailed people we had never met. We had calls with people in Norway and Ireland who were processing oats, only to discover that they had found a solution for small-scale oat processing but didn’t want to share this trade secret.
Ultimately, there was nobody processing oats for human consumption in the UK at the scale we wanted to do it. Having eventually gained a patchwork of insights into what the process might entail and where the gaps were, we were able to create a list of the steps we needed to complete – cleaning, drying, dehulling, stabilising, storing – without knowing the specific machines we needed.
The need we identified was partly material – we already had some oats we wanted to grow – and partly speculative – we knew that we wanted to expand our oat production, but it wouldn’t be worth farmers doing this if they didn’t have a route to market for the oats. We decided to buy some shared machinery as a relatively small group of active members. Adopting a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality, our hope was that in having the machines available for oat processing, we would be able to convert some of the growing enthusiasm to grow oats that was often directed towards us into action.
Having identified the first step in the oat processing journey – seed cleaning – we decided to start here. We applied to the Seed Sovereignty Microfund, which was offering funds from the Krietman Foundation to help agroecological groups in the UK to overcome barriers in accessing equipment for seed processing. Our recent partnership with a Welsh brewery who were willing to make a beer from our oats, offering much needed income to the farmers growing our rare oats, created a good case for needing a seed cleaner to process the oats to a high enough quality for the brewery. We were delighted to receive approximately 5k from this fund, which allowed us to get into the nitty-gritty of which machine to buy.
Finding other people in the UK to be either using vintage grain cleaners (on a smaller scale) or larger grain cleaners (beyond our scale), we decided we would have to take a ‘gamble’ on an imported machine suited to our scale. After many questions asked of the seller, the Alistain Agro Aerodynamic grain cleaner ALS-3 gen-3 was chosen.
So far, we have found this machine to be a good fit for us. Arriving as a metal flat pack, the assembly was fairly smooth (following a detailed guide sent with the machine) and allowed us to better understand how it works. Because of the simple design, it feels like something we could potentially undertake small repairs on ourselves. It is relatively lightweight, which means that two people can safely move it around the barn. It cleans our oats well and allows us to move on to the next stage in the processing.
Our Llafur Ni network is an informal network of grain growers, facilitated by the Seed Sovereignty Programme. We are not legally constituted in our own right. This caused problems when purchasing our first machine: a machine cannot be legally owned by an informal network. Although an informal structure might work if all members are trusting of one another and happy with the risk they take in sharing an asset, you cannot insure a machine that is owned informally.
While we had members of our group willing to house the machine, this led to questions over what would happen if it broke and who would be liable if something went wrong. It became clear that we needed a more formal arrangement in order to resolve these bureaucratic but important questions.
A solution was sent to us in the form of the newly created Carmarthen Machinery Ring. Facilitated by Social Farms and Gardens, this recently formed machinery ring is the result of a partnership with Carmarthen Council and the local food partnership Bwyd Sir Gâr Food. With funding from the Level Up Fund, they had already purchased a library of machines suited to horticultural food production. While their focus had been on local vegetable production, they were looking to move into grain production on their community-owned host farm Bremenda Isaf. They were willing to host our grain cleaner.
While SF&G would now officially own our grain cleaner, it has been placed in the Carmarthen Machinery Ring and is open to our members to use when they need. This model of shared ownership and shared access is so far working well for us.
Because we decided to partner with the Carmarthen Machinery Ring, the decision on where to house our machine was clear. Carmarthen Machinery Ring are located on the council-owned farm Bremenda Isaf, fairly close to Carmarthen in South Wales. Although this location was not geographically perfect for us (a geographically perfect location for us would have been further north, equidistant between our members), it was close enough to our members for them to feasibly transport trailers of crops there when needed.
Anyone accessing the Carmarthen Machinery Ring inventory can view the information and availability of our grain cleaner and make a booking through the platform.
Had we not decided to purchase imported machinery collectively and house that machinery in an existing machinery ring, the members of Llafur Ni would not have access to the oat cleaning facilities needed to move their oats onto the next stage in our processing journey. Despite the challenges of navigating issues of ownership, insurance, user management and finances, it feels good to know that the systems we have set up will provide a foundation for more people to use this machine. For us, individual ownership would have resulted in the burden of responsibility and liability falling to one person, whereas the machinery ring option has allowed us to utilise the power of cooperation to share the burden and the benefits.
If you’d like more information, you can read the full Collective Machine Ownership Guide.
