The Tractor and machinery thread

[FrothNinja]

Modern tractors can be driven too quickly imo. I suppose it is the cost of efficiency. It is amazing what can be done nowadays with modern farm machinery.

If you still needed 20 or 30 people to dig a field of potatoes, as was still commonplace when I was growing up, I suspect your food would cost a lot more in the shops, and how many teenagers today would be better able to tear themselves away from a screen for long enough to gather potatoes from the ground into baskets with your hands in agony from all the damp soil getting pushed under your nails? Or walking around with hundredweight bags on your back and loading the lorry by hand?

I love to mess around with old tractors and machinery but when you remove the rose tinted specs, all the modern machinery makes life a lot easier.

On the big (too big for country roads) modern jobs all you are really doing is supervising the autopilot and gps - unless you hurtling at an ungodly speed trying to cram as many contracts as possible into a single day.
Much happier when it was DBs, Nuffields/Leylands, Fordson, little Internationals etc - plus I could fix them in the field most of the time, not that I did that very often.
Some of the little ones coming out of China and India are quite fun (& more comfortable).

 

[tyred]

On the big (too big for country roads) modern jobs all you are really doing is supervising the autopilot and gps - unless you hurtling at an ungodly speed trying to cram as many contracts as possible into a single day.
Much happier when it was DBs, Nuffields/Leylands, Fordson, little Internationals etc - plus I could fix them in the field most of the time, not that I did that very often.
Some of the little ones coming out of China and India are quite fun (& more comfortable).

I definitely agree with you to a large extent, modern tractors are too big and fast for most rural roads, but I definitely understand how we've reached this point and it all requires a lot less labour, which is expensive and hard to find nowadays.

 

[FrothNinja]

I definitely agree with you to a large extent, modern tractors are too big and fast for most rural roads, but I definitely understand how we've reached this point and it all requires a lot less labour, which is expensive and hard to find nowadays.

True, but it seems to be the really big concerns doing most of the big tractor work - except at baling/wrapping time where the modern machinery has meant less hay etc is wasted compared with old methods.
The new tech isn't cheap, so I'm not convinced it's made things cheaper in real terms - and the farmers I know are claiming overheads are up and margins down compared to 20 years ago. I do wonder if that is a combination of bulk buying by supermarkets etc and the withdrawal of a lot of subsidies.
Luckily, agricultural shows seem to be going strong and their are plenty of folks rescuing classic tractors.