Keith Mount of Keith Mount (Liming) Ltd has just celebrated 50 years in the agricultural liming business.

Keith Mount celebrates his
half-century in the lime trade

AUGUST 2008 was an important milestone for Keith Mount as it marked the 50th anniversary of his involvement with the agricultural lime business. In an age when jobs are no longer for life, the man behind Keith Mount Liming can at least claim he has always worked in the same sector, and half that time has been with his own, or his family’s, business.

It was as a 16-year-old that Keith left school to join the family firm, started by his great grandfather, Joseph Mount, 90 years earlier in 1868. Although little is known about the early days of the operation, the company traded in lime and coal until the late 1930s, and by the 1950s it was concentrating solely on chalk products, extracted from a quarry at Brandon, Suffolk.

In 1958, when Keith joined, there were 12 staff employed in producing chalk and lime products, including whiting, which at the time was packed for sale in cloth bags.

By 1968, however, it had become clear that the business was not increasing and could not continue without substantial investment. The directors subsequently took the decision to sell the operation, and Keith decided to look for a new job.

He joined the Euston Lime Company in 1969, but that was a short-lived position as it also decided to cease agricultural lime production as farming went through a downturn in the early 1970s.

In 1972 he was approached by Howes Lime Company, which was looking to expand its business. He fell straight into the job and spent the next 21 years there, ending up running the sales operation.

In 1992 Keith Mount Liming was founded, with the goal of offering the farmers of East Anglia independent advice, as well as a much wider range of liming materials. Keith was able to start up his new company with an expanding sales and admin team, while Howes Lime Company was happy to appoint him as distributor for its products, leaving it to concentrate purely on lime quarrying for agriculture.

Keith and his team have continued to serve their customers well ever since and have grown the business to become one of the country’s largest agricultural lime suppliers.

While the Mount family business was supplying – and spreading – about 10,000t of lime/year in 1958, Keith Mount Liming traded more than 80,000t in the year to June 2008. And while the original business operated mostly in Suffolk and Norfolk, Keith now sells lime in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire, as well as the fringes of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.

Today lime application is in the hands of a team of 30 or more independent spreading contractors across the sales area, and it is the job of Keith and his staff to manage the logistics of sourcing lime and getting it delivered and spread when required.

“About 50% of the lime we sell is applied post harvest,” Keith told Farmers Guide. “At this time of year we spend about 80 hours/week soil testing, as well as managing the logistics of a haulage and spreading operation that’s dealing with more than 1,000t/day at peak times.

“It’s a case of co-ordinating everything so the lime is delivered and spread on the same day.”

Maximum efficiency means using a range of suppliers and Keith can call on about a dozen quarries – some working exclusively for Keith Mount Liming – around the country including Yorkshire, Derbyshire, three in Lincolnshire, three in Norfolk; two each in Hertfordshire and Suffolk; one in Cambridgeshire and another in Essex. The company is also the largest independent distributor of LimeX, the sugar beet by-product sold by British Sugar.

With many customers growing vegetables and sugar beet, the company has a reasonable amount of out-of-season liming work and is able to keep some of its spreading contractors going all year round. And although the summer is still the busiest time of year for the office and field advisers, the increased popularity of soil testing keeps the team busy for most of the year.

“There’s no doubt I enjoy the job,” Keith said. “I’ve been out there so long seeing people that many of them are friends as well as customers.

“We have about 1,000 customer accounts, although we are seeing the number of farmers fall as smaller farms merge into larger units.”

Diversification

Keith’s eldest son Andrew joined the family firm – which operates from premises at Rougham, near Bury St Edmunds – in 1994, and now jointly runs the company. He has developed new areas of the business that are designed to take the company into the future with alternative products and services appealing to a wider range of farms.

Ferteco green waste compost is one innovation that’s in great demand, with farmers keen to take advantage of available nutrients.

“As well as containing N, P and K, the compost opens up the soil and makes it easier to work,” Keith said. “It helps with microbial activity in the soil and on light land can raise the organic matter as well as increasing moisture retention.”

Other alternative fertilisers, including Fibrophos and Super slag basic, are also sold and are finding a ready customer base as growers look for cost-effective substitutes to inorganic fertiliser.

Another side to the business that has also taken off is GPS nutrient mapping. The Keith Mount Liming service, Phield teK, pinpoints variations in nutrient levels for each field and can save farmers huge amounts by significantly reducing fertiliser requirements. Coupled with this is a variable-rate application spreading service to get the best use from data collected.

The company has always carried out pH testing and soil analysis, so it has been easy to offer the add-on service to customers old and new.

“With our standard service, we’re providing one analysis per field,” Keith said. “The Phield teK system gives an individual analysis for P, K, Mg & pH for every hectare.

“The results are supplied on a disk or memory stick so that farmers can carry out their own variable-rate applications, or we can arrange the whole service through our team of contractors.

“With fertiliser prices at an all time high, it’s easy to justify a service like this. Andrew has been behind this development and has been very successful with several very large contracts already under our belt, although we’re happy to sample a few fields for people who wish to try it out.”

Looking ahead, Keith doesn’t see too many changes in the industry where he has spent the past 50 years.

“Extracting and spreading lime has become as technologically advanced as is economically viable and I don’t see that changing much,” he said. “Growers need to achieve the pH levels necessary to grow their crops, so there will always be a demand for lime.

“One thing that I do see changing, however, is farm size, and I’m confident that consolidation will see farms continually getting bigger.”