Life Observed

Seen on Stockbridge high street on bank holiday monday. En-route to the Dorset steam fair I suspect.  What a fantastic piece of machinery. Not a steam roller, not a traction engine but a showman's engine with a great big generator up front. Chariot racing?  Really?

Driving around in it's very own cloud of dust, the big Fendt tractor and huge disk harrow make short work of another field. The seed drill awaits, another year starts. The photographer did get covered in dust to take this picture. We suffer for our art you know.

The new wave in farming seems to be Minimum Tillage or MinTill. This explains why you don't see fields being ploughed so much these days. The idea is to minimise the disturbance to the top layer of the soil, and thereby retain most of the nutrients where they are needed, so fields just get roughed up after harvest, then they send in the giant seed drill. These giant octopus like implements scrape and clatter across the fields at high speed putting seed into the soil and covering it over in a precise and controlled manner. Some things don't change though: You still get the seagulls following the tractor.

Today I return to a favourite subject of mine. The fifty year old Massey Ferguson 35 that lives and works on the farm in the village. We had one of these on the farm when I was young and I learned to drive on something very similar. This one is the later 3 cylinder diesel version. I think this is an icon of an object made for a purpose, one version even made it to the South Pole in 1958. It has all the bits you need and nothing extra. The fact that they are still seen in operation fifty years later is a testament to their original design. Long may it continue...

Here is the front left corner of a fifty year old Massey Ferguson 35, an agricultural design icon in my opinion. There was one of these on the farm where I grew up, and I drove it regularly from age twelve. I suppose that form follows function, but I have always been impressed with the simple and basic design of this tractor. Everything is as strong and as heavy as it needs to be, but no more. The blue Fordson tractors of the same era looked like converted steam engines by comparison. You can see at a glance how the steering geometry works , and how it is optimised to reduce bump steer. You can unbolt the front axle and set the wheels further apart if you wanted to. It was all rather self explanatory. These days all tractors look roughly the same: Huge tyres, big engines, with suspension, air conditioned cabs and SatNav. This old Fergie is not some restored show tractor, or an exhibit out of a Countryside Museum. It is still used every day for light duties. In fact...

After yesterday's gloomy post, let's have something a little lighter. Here we found ourselves on Kerrera, an island off Oban on the West Coast of Scotland. Here I discovered the bare bones of an old Fordson model F or N, picked clean by the local farmer and left as a heavy thing you tie boats to. In fact, this was not the first abandoned tractor we discovered on Kerrera. Perhaps the climate is particularly harsh and takes its toll on internal combustion engines... We also suspect that the sheep there eat shingle.  BTW. Kerrera is a Gallic word which means dead farming implement and mimics the sound of a tractor that won't start.

This close up of the Berkshire sod reveals a ploughed field. The smooth surfaces of the soil shows it has felt the touch of Coulter, Ploughshare and Mould board . These oddly named parts form a traditional agricultural plough, an implement that turns the soil over, exposing a new surface for planting and burying last years stubble to rot and add nutrients. The traditional four furrow plough is an antique these days. Huge tractors now wield seven and eight furrow ploughs, which cover the ground quite quickly. However ploughing is not the only game in town. Sometimes the soil is not turned over,  just broken up. This huge machine is treating a stubble field featured elsewhere in this blog. This is not ploughing, I think it is a spring tine cultivator or possibly a chisel plough. These do not dig so deep into the soil but require a lot of power to pull them. This mechanical beast was able to root up the old crop at running pace. Its a far cry from the old shire ...