Efficiency is key,” points out MathewLewis, who, along with his brothers Thomas and Jack, manages a multi-pronged contracting enterprise near Carmarthen. The three brothers took over the reins of the business from their father in 2022 to create Lewis Brothers Contracting. Surrounded by dairy farms, the list of jobs undertaken primarily extends to more than 1,800ha of grass silage, slurry spreading and grass reseeding, with three excavators also on the firm’s books for groundworks and land drainage.
Their father Martin started out with slurry spreading and then added cutting silage to the list of services in the late 1980s. These jobs still form the backbone of the operation for the new generation. When we visited, Jack was working in New Zealand, getting some additional experience, while Mathew and Thomas were out working with the two umbilical set-ups. “We have always spread slurry, and today we should shift around 3,000 cube with the two pumps,” explains Mathew, as he manoeuvres his way along the field with the double splash plate.
Umbilical spreading has long been a popular service in South Wales, but this also means that most contractors have at least one outfit if not two, a population
