With the cost of new tractors heading increasingly skywards, one Warwickshire contractor has made it a key part of his business to seek out high-spec, second-hand models … so he can keep finances readily available for investing in new implements

It doesn’t seem so long ago that Warwickshire contractor Matthew Kirkham was buying new tractors for his general contracting business. Back then, average tractor hp for the firm was about 130hp. But productivity knows no bounds, and, as the business has grown, it has sought to extract more and more hp for better productivity and efficiency. If the firm could buy anything, it would buy time, although for now it is happy to settle on bigger tractors and machinery to do more work in fewer hours.