Standing in a storage area directly in front of his FD135 FlexDraper®, Overbury Enterprises farm manager Jake Freestone is casual in front of the camera as he answers questions for a video about the header he’s now owned for a decade.

He introduces himself and the farm — a family-owned, three-century-old estate in England on the Gloucestershire/Worcestershire border where they cut around 1000 hectares of combinable crops a year — describing it as a mixed arable business with a sheep farm and growing largely wheat, barley, feed beans, oilseed rape and grass on varying soil types and elevations.

The introduction is polished, succinct, and informative, as you would expect from a guy who has managed the same estate for more than 20 years. And Freestone has made nearly the exact same introduction three times before, specifically with MacDon, as the company has been following Freestone’s journey since he imported that FD135 — the first FlexDraper® header in the U.K.— ten years ago.

In those past ten years, Freestone has become a vocal supporter and an unofficial ambassador for the MacDon brand in the U.K.; as a well-respected member of the local farming community (in 2021 he was awarded the Farmers Weekly Environmental Champion and the British Farming Awards Arable Innovator of the Year), Freestone’s praise carries weight, and when the header makes an appearance in his posts on social media – where he has around 9,000 followers combined on Instagram and YouTube – it often drums up comments and interest.

“Once he started using (the FD135) and his whole association with us at MacDon, he's just been really forward with putting things on social media and interviews and talking to people,” says Warren Shirtcliff – who also goes by Waz – a MacDon staffer who has worked closely with Freestone for years.

“Other people look up to Jake in Overbury Farm and say, ‘Oh, Jake's got one that must be quite good.’ And so that helped us get a foothold throughout quite a few different places.

“Jake's one of the originals. So after Jake, there's a group of originals that believed in us, I guess, and that's made it work in the U.K. Jake's really the initiator of that. He's just a very quiet, unassuming achiever that's been really great for us.”

“The MacDon's featured in quite a few of his YouTube videos. He's always speaking highly of us. So that's definitely been good for the brand and marketing,” adds Rob Brough, a U.K.-based combine specialist at MacDon.

“Guys like Jake have the following on social media. And it's surprising how many farmers do watch those, listen to them, and take on board what's being said. And especially from somebody who's willing to try things and gives honest reviews of stuff on his social media.

“Some (managers) don't spend time operating the equipment, so they don't have the same understanding of how it works and the benefits it provides. So having somebody who is actively interested in knowing how to operate the equipment and seeing what it's doing in the field is valuable.”

But long before Freestone became an agricultural influencer, he started his MacDon journey with a scholarship and a research trip.

Freestone’s parents are not farmers — they were both educators in the school system — so his connection to the industry comes through his godfather, who had a farm in Bedfordshire, England. Freestone recalls going there on holidays or weekends as a young adult, catching the bus on his own from the city of Bristol, where he lived, excited to lark around in the countryside.

“As an 11, 12, 13-year-old city kid, being out in the countryside with the cows, milking cows, fishing in the river that they had running through the farm, riding go-karts around, riding on hay bales, and things like that. All those things the health and safety people wouldn’t let you do anymore,” he laughs.

“I fell in love with being a farmer, and what that might look like, and I knew I never would have the capital to do it on my own,” he explains, noting he then went to agricultural college before accepting opportunities to manage land for farm owners. He joined the team at Overbury Enterprises in 2003.

In 2013, Freestone undertook a Nuffield Farming Scholarship, which allowed him to travel around the world to interview some of the very best farmers on earth and see how their processes and practices might help solve the specific problem he was researching: the wheat yield plateau in the U.K.

“Since the 1990s, wheat yields have sort of plateaued across the country, and we haven't got very much further forward,” says Freestone.

“So, I was going around the world trying to break the wheat yield plateau in the U.K., and I thought I would find a magic bullet or two around in terms of maybe plant breeding, genetics, new chemistry, things like that. And what I discovered was that basically we had been messing around with our soils too much; over-cultivation, intensive fertilizers, intensive pesticides, all those sorts of things, lowering our organic matter in our soils.”

The journey took him to Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and other locales, and many of the farmers he was inspired by the most had two things in common: first, they practiced regenerative farming, a holistic farming system focused on restoring soil health, reversing climate change, and boosting biodiversity. Second, they were all using MacDon headers.

“That kind of got the bowl thinking, well, why are they doing that? What's so special about this bit of kit? We need to look at that in a bit more detail,” says Freestone.

So, at home in the U.K., Freestone and his combine driver went to see a MacDon header in action. It wasn’t a FlexDraper®; it was a rigid head, and it was being used to harvest winter beans. After just one viewing and a conversation with the owner, both Freestone and his combine driver were impressed enough to more seriously consider purchasing their own.

“We grow lots of different crops. It's very well suited to — we were growing peas at the time — so low short crops, potentially flat crops. We've got a lot of stones here. We've also got changing topography and rolling hills. So it just made an awful lot of sense to try and get a FlexDraper® here. So, yeah, that's what we did,” says Freestone.

But being a trailblazer does not come without risk, something Freestone is keenly aware of. Thankfully, he was implicitly supported by the owner of the estate, Penelope Bossom, who he says was “incredibly enthusiastic” and loved technology that was different and cutting-edge.

Freestone worked with their John Deere dealers at Chris Tallis Farm Machinery, who in turn worked closely with MacDon to get the very first FlexDrapers sent to the U.K. — one for Freestone at Overbury and then an additional one as a demonstrator, because “if we’re going to bring one over, we might as well bring two,” Freestone recalls the dealer saying.

“It was a massive risk, especially for a farm manager who is working for the family that owns the farm. If it all goes wrong, I might get sacked, but hopefully not. But it's not my money, so that was quite daunting,” Freestone laughs, knowing now that risk was undoubtedly worth taking.

Fast-forward some months, and in 2016, a fresh-faced, forty-something Freestone welcomed the MacDon team to Overbury Enterprises to witness and film the very first day of harvest with the new FD135 FlexDraper® header. 

See the 2016 MacDon interview here.

See Jake Freestone’s Harvest 2016 playlist here.

As the combine with the MacDon header attached rolls through the field behind him, Freestone explains how he could “see instantly the advantages from a draper-type header,” attached to his John Deere 680 combine.

“We’re looking to put 1000 hectares or so through that each year, so it’s a bit at its limit. Anything we can do to increase throughput and increase output from that combine, we need to be able to do. And the MacDon draper header is certainly doing that from what we’ve seen on the harvest so far,” he states in the 2016 interview. 

Shirtcliff started his work with MacDon the same year Freestone bought the FD135. Along with another MacDon employee from Brazil, Shirtcliff made the trek to the U.K for the first time to get Freestone set up. He inspected and assembled the header, got it up and running, and then continued to check in on Freestone afterward to make sure he was still happy with how things were going.

“And we've been doing that for, well, it'll be 10 years this year,” laughs Waz.

“Jake's obviously become a pretty good friend. And the whole farm there is just so friendly and welcoming…he's just really friendly and approachable, but he's a very, very astute farmer and farm manager. He was a Nuffield scholar and traveled around the world, and so he's got some ideas that weren't far-fetched from what I'd seen in New Zealand farming, but he isn't afraid to push the boat out a wee bit and do things sometimes a little bit out of the ordinary if he thinks it's going to help the system. And he's done that very successfully.

“When I land (in the U.K.), I usually get in the car and drive straight over and say g’day to Jake.”

In 2018, the MacDon video crew returned to catch up with Freestone during his third harvest with the FD135. 

See the 2018 MacDon interview here.

“It has delivered everything it has said it would do,” he says on film, while literally driving the combine and header over Cotswold brash, stony soil about 1000 feet above sea level. And in flex mode, the header bounces beautifully over the slightly undulating field, leaving an even stubble height. He notes that, even three years in, daily maintenance has been minimal, and they’ve had no breakdowns.

“I can’t think of anything we have had go wrong at all with it over the three years,” Freestone says in the video. “It hasn’t disappointed in any way, shape, or form.

“I’m more pleased as time’s gone on, actually, in terms of different circumstances, different seasons, different crops, different crop conditions, how it’s been very easy to adapt. Whether we are direct-cutting linseed or big crops of oilseed rape/canola, it’s just very straightforward, very easy. Swapping from one crop to the other is actually no effort whatsoever. The use of side knives for cutting oilseed rape, and we put them on for our peas as well, it’s literally a five-minute job, which we didn’t have that luxury with our previous cutter bar. So, it has worked really, really well, very pleased,” he says.

There is no question in Freestone’s mind whether the price of the FD135 — which isn’t a small investment — was worth it, because he has been literally doing a cost analysis since before they even completed the purchase.

“When we first looked at the cost of the header, obviously, it was more expensive than a competitor's machine, so we needed to work out how we were going to get that money back. So the original calculations were just sort of budgeted, and we also thought, ‘Right, if we're going to buy it, it's got to be robust enough to more than one combine. So the FD1 was on three combines that we had here over a 10-year period. It just did 10 harvests,” Freestone explains in a June 2026 phone interview.

“I wanted to be able to go to Penelope and just say, look, for your investment, this is what it's going to cost you over — we actually did it over a 10-year period. So we looked at the depreciation over that time period, and then we also — because we code everything, so all of our machines, vehicles, even people have got their own code, so as we buy spares and repairs, we can use our software to actually code it directly to that machine — so we know exactly what that has cost over all the years. And obviously, we track it through the farm management software to look at how many acres it's cut and that side of things. So it's a very straightforward calculation to look at what it has actually cost per hectare or per year over that period of time, and it's remarkably affordable.”

In 2021, when the MacDon video team returned for a third time to check in on Freestone and his FD135, he was able to break down the cost specifically to around GBP £1.14 per hectare, when considering only the cost of parts.

See the 2021 MacDon interview here.

“I’m not going to say that’s an insignificant cost, but it is so low in comparison to what we had before,” he says in that interview.

If he were to also consider the time saved on maintenance and lack of breakdowns, the increase in operational speed, and simply the fact of having a wider header increases efficiency and lowers the carbon footprint, the header has basically paid for itself.

“All of these small savings start to add up when you look at the ownership of a header like this that’s going to be on the farm for probably ten years,” he says.

“You’d be foolish to budget all of those things based on not having first-hand knowledge and experience with this, but having had that now, I would be very confident if we went to another one or if somebody else was looking at changing one, of having that data, that information, that experience to be able to pass that knowledge on to help make other farms a little bit more efficient.”

This year, Freestone and Overbury Enterprises decided to upgrade.

In his most recent video interview, which took place in early 2026, a now fifty-something Freestone runs through the practiced introduction of himself and the farm, but this time, in addition to talking about how the FD135 header has positively impacted the estate for the last decade, Freestone is also talking about the farm’s newest acquisition, an FD241 FlexDraper®.

While there are still lots of years of life left in the FD135 — the much-beloved header was purchased by a regenerative farmer (and friend) located in Kent, England, and will be well taken care of — Freestone says the increase in size of the header is keeping pace with the increase in size of many of the other pieces of equipment on the estate. They now have a 36-meter sprayer and a nine-meter drill, which may soon be bumped up to a 12-meter option, so it made sense for Freestone to have a header that will “match in for that for a potential controlled-traffic farming system, in due course.”

“And there are some new functionalities on the 241 that we're excited to be able to deploy a bit more, like the contour following (CountourMax™ Contour Wheels) with a much higher stubble, if you like, for our direct drilling and having less residue on the ground. That's kind of going to be the main one. And you do need to keep sort of investing and keeping things modern and up to date on these things,” he says.

And, much like when he purchased the FD135, the MacDon team was ready and willing to be on-site to make sure he got the new FD241 up and running.

Simon Kirk, who works in sales and product support for MacDon in the U.K., demoed an FD245 for Freestone and explained the differences between the FD135 and the FD2 models.

“He's very knowledgeable, and he does his homework on probably every piece of machinery or product that he buys; he will do his homework (and) background on it. So he knew a lot about it even before we got there,” says Kirk.

Kirk returned to Overbury when the new header arrived, and will return again when Freestone and his team are ready to get it up and running in the field. Freestone appreciates Kirk’s availability and the ability to pick up the phone and call him anytime with questions or concerns.

“Tim (combine driver) did say the other day, he said, ‘I'm going to have to ring Simon because I can't quite remember how to get it to do one particular function.’  We've got his telephone number… if there are problems, any of us can ring him, and if he's about, then great. If not, then he can fix us over the phone,” says Freestone.

And what are Freestone’s hopes for this new era of Overbury Enterprises with an FD241 FlexDraper® in the mix?

“I've got every confidence that this machine is going to last the 10 years that the previous one has done,” says Freestone.

“We have got some big challenges over here in UK agriculture and food production. Not least with sort of pre-harvest glyphosate and things like that, that we haven't personally used here for a long time, but I'm just half-toying with the ideas of swathing, potentially, some crops, which MacDon obviously would be the first call on speed dial for that,” he laughs.

“But just the reliability. I hope that continues; I have no doubt that it will.”

Links:
Jake Freestone YouTube 
Overbury Enterprises 

Visit our product pages to learn more:
FD2 Series FlexDraper® Header

Additional Resources:
MacDon Performance Parts
Owners Resources
How To Video Library
MacDon Dealer Locator