50 YEARS OF COMBINING
TWO COMBINES FOR THE
PRICE OF A SERVICE
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A black and white photograph on the wall of Martin Boulden’s Court Lodge Farm office shows a Claas Matador combine harvester working its way steadily through a field of wheat just outside Ashford in Kent. From a desk drawer, the Aldington farmer produces the original invoice, revealing that in April 1962 the family business paid around £5,500 – including an ‘out-of-season discount’ – for not one, but two, Matadors. “It costs me more than that each year to service that one,” he commented, pointing out into the yard, where a Claas Lexion 770 equipped with a 40ft header stood ready to tackle this season’s harvest once it had dried off enough after the previous day’s rain. And he wasn’t joking. On the upside, Martin, who has been driving combines for half a century, pointed out that it would take 26 of the Matadors in the photograph to do the work of the Lexion, which can operate at 70 tonnes per hour, to say nothing of the benefits of air conditioning, GPS and the dozens of other modern refinements. By the time Martin left school in 1972 at the age of 16 he had already been helping out on the family farm for a few years, driving one of the business’s three combines for real while most of his contemporaries were still dreaming of learning to drive a car. The family’s farming connection with Kent goes back a long way, with greatgrandfather David owning Pinn Farm in Bonnington in the late 19th century. Martin’s grandfather George, meanwhile, bought Ruffins Hill Farm in Aldington in 1908, growing wheat and oats on 150 acres of land and breeding horses for the Army, as well as keeping sheep. Three of George’s four sons, Peter, Clive and John, joined the family business,
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and Martin still trades as G L Boulden and Sons in tribute to that heritage. He is Peter’s son and has now been joined in the business by his own son, Paul. Grandfather George was conscripted at the start of the first world war but was soon sent back once the powers that be realised that farmers were too vital to the domestic war effort to be sent overseas. “I sometimes think back to the life my grandfather had,” Martin reflected. “He went through the first world war and the depression in the thirties before then experiencing another world war, and during that time he brought up four boys. People today don’t realise what life was like for that generation.” George died in 1975 at the age of 92, leaving Martin’s dad and uncles at the helm of the business. The family bought Court Lodge Farm in 1950, paying just £13,500 for 350 acres and five cottages, and the business has expanded steadily ever since. Including a considerable amount of tenanted land, G L Boulden and Sons now farms 3,500 acres spread over 13 parishes in and around Aldington. The land is used to grow wheat, barley, oats, beans, peas, linseed and oilseed rape, while livestock includes 1,000 Romney ewes, 85 suckler cattle in three herds, together with youngstock, and a herd of some 20 Blonde D’Aquitaine cattle at Swanton Farm, Bilsington. The business got rid of its dairy herd about 30 years ago, as did most of the other local farmers. “There were once 13 dairy herds in and around Aldington, but now there are none,” Martin said. The arable operation is essentially mintill, with a limited amount of ploughing and no direct drilling as the land is not suitable and blackgrass is a persistent problem.
