This workshop-built muckspreader is now more than 10 years old.

Niche services are key to the Keebles’ success

BLAXHALL, Suffolk-based DE Keeble Ltd has been serving the agricultural community in North-east Suffolk for more than 50 years. The company, which is run by Derek Keeble, with help from his wife Linda and his mother Dorothy, was started by Derek’s father, also Derek, in the 1950s.

The family have strong links to the countryside; Derek’s grandfather worked on Viscount Ullswater’s estate at nearby Campsea Ashe, while his father also worked on a farm before joining the army. On leaving the military, he returned to the area and set up business as a gang master, supplying labour for mowing weeds from river banks, hoeing sugar beet and forestry work.

The move into contracting came when the company bought an early Stohl beet harvester and was one of the first to offer mechanical lifting.

“My father saw the opportunity to offer a service that no-one else was supplying,” Derek told Farmers Guide. “He also had the foresight to start hedge and verge cutting in 1962 when the first flail hedge cutters were introduced by Lupat.”

Keeble’s has long since given up sugar beet harvesting, with Derek citing the large number of contractors fighting for the same work, but hedge and verge cutting remains an important activity for the business.

“We have been cutting verges for Suffolk County Council since 1983 and have cut more than 50,000 miles along the county’s roads,” Derek said, adding that the company also carries out water grip clearing for the local authority, as well as hedgecutting services for farmers.

Ask Derek what kind of equipment he favours for hedgecutting and another unique aspect of DE Keeble Ltd emerges.

“We actually build a lot of the equipment we use ourselves,” he said. “Our hedgecutters were built in our own workshops to meet high safety standards and to ensure a quality finish.”

The firm’s two hedgecutters are mid-mounted, for maximum stability and ease-of-use, on 125hp Ford New Holland tractors and feature long-reach arms fitted with 1.25m cutting heads.

Derek mainly learned his engineering skills on the job, although he credits the late John Watson, of Bucklesham, and his own brother, Paul – who he calls a proper engineer – as valuable mentors.

“Over the years I’ve found there are two main benefits to building our own kit,” he said. “You get a machine that does exactly what you want it to, and you save a lot of money.”

The firm has continued to stay one-step ahead of the competition by operating in niche areas. In 1995, for example, Derek began spreading straw on carrots, and again the machinery that was being sold to do the job wasn’t as good as it could be.

“The first machines could just about spread the straw, but we customised them so they would work far more efficiently,” he said. “We fabricated special bale grabs and a polythene cutter so that the operator could cut the plastic at the end of the row and start work again on the next row without leaving the cab.”

At its peak, the Keebles’ straw-spreading business was applying 13,000 big bales onto carrot crops each autumn, although this has now dropped to 6,000 bales; and the firm has had to extend the area it works in to Bury St Edmunds in the West and Norwich to the North.

DE Keeble can offer carrot growers a complete service because it also supplies the straw that is spread. The company buys straw from cereal growers and makes about 20,000 big bales each year for resale, as well as carrying out contract baling with Hesston, mini-Hesston and conventional balers.

“We have been fortunate that the falling demand for straw for carrot production has coincided with a growing demand from the Elean straw-burning power station at Ely, which is the largest of its kind in Europe,” Derek said. “The rest of our straw goes to livestock producers for bedding.”

The rise in alternative power sources has had another effect on the Keebles’ business; it used to spread a large quantity of hen manure from the Eye area, but this is now burnt to generate electricity.

“Again, a good bit of the hen manure has been replaced by alternative fertilisers like sludge and green-waste compost,” Derek said. “And we’ve found that customers are taking their manure much more seriously as fertiliser prices have increased. We can supply a wide range of manures and composts to customers, and we use a weighing loader to accurately record the amount of material that is applied.”

The business’ muckspreaders were again built in-house and boast an impressive specification. They have a capacity of 14 cubic metres; dual spinning decks; tandem axles with wide flotation tyres; a 40ft spread width; and they can spread at rates from 2-20t/acre or more. The quality of the build is clear from the fact that one of the spreaders was built 10 years ago and is still going strong

Dealing with such large quantities of straw, the firm also runs a small fleet of trucks for deliveries to the power station, and this has led to other opportunities including backloads of baled hemp from Cambridgeshire to the new processing plant at Halesworth.

“We have also become involved in baling hemp locally,” Derek said. “It has proved quite difficult and we had to make some modifications to one of our balers to get the job done efficiently.

“I like a bit of a challenge, though, and I like it when something just needs the right machinery to make the job go. Cutting the hemp is another area that needs some attention and is something I might have a look at.

“It’s as true now as it was in my father’s day, if you get involved in something new you get a chance of cornering the market.”

Derek, Linda and Dorothy are rightly proud of the business they have helped to build, and the fact that they provide employment for six local people at a time when jobs in rural areas are hard to find.

It’s clear that the company does things differently – especially by building and modifying its kit to do the job as well as possible – but it’s a way of operating that clearly works.