Many a Muddy Morning by Mark Warren

Author:Mark Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

There was a time when tractor technology was very much less advanced than it is today, meaning that crawler tractors — which are, to all intents and purposes, bulldozers — were the only safe option for carting gear on steep, slippery hill country. Not that they were entirely safe. Once the tracks were clogged, as happens readily in our clay conditions, you might as well have been on skis. Trying to steer a crawler tractor skating backwards downhill with a trailer loaded high with posts is character-forming, to say the least. Your only option is to drop the blade with as much hydraulic down-force as possible to try to prevent a jack-knife.

The advent of 4WD tractors changed everything. Not only are they much faster, cheaper to run and more cost-efficient, but I find them safer, too, as when you’re in a steep, slippery situation you get a bit of warning before you lose traction and start sliding backwards out of control. And even supposing you’re being dragged by a trailer, as long as you’re in 4WD and you’ve got tyres with the correct tread angle and at the correct pressure, you can control your descent — to a point.

I had been eyeing up an unproductive block, mostly comprising a steep, rough, broken slippery slope. I had decided that if I could disc it — turn over the soil with big cutting discs and prepare it for sowing with pasture grass — we could use it to break-feed the rising two-year, in-calf heifers. No one else was offering to do the job, and in fact one or two of the more proficient operators had pronounced one particular part of the slope as impossible to work with the discs. I didn’t quite see it that way, and had worked out that if I were to turn the implement’s cut off and drag it to the top of the slope by a different ridge, I could launch the tractor and discs off at the top and let gravity do a lot of the hard work.

So here I was, giving it a go. I sucked in my stomach and pulled the slack out of the seatbelt and then tipped the nose of the tractor over the brow of the hill, putting my feet up on the dashboard to brace. For a few minutes, all seemed to be going well — until there was an almighty crash behind me and a major thud on the roof of the cab. I brought the tractor to a stop, turned it off, and climbed out.

It was another of those ‘if only I had a camera’ moments! The discs were upended on the top of the tractor cab. The piece of number-8 wire through the bottom hole of the hitching pin had shore, and the pin had wriggled upwards and out. With the discs uncoupled, rather than simply staying put as the tractor went on without them, the drawbar had dug into the ground and the momentum of the implement had caused it to pole-vault onto the tractor.

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