NorthPembs
Member
- Location
- Pembrokeshire
The little grey Fergie we had when I was a kind occupies a central position in my memories of life as a farming child, first on our smallholding, then on a miniature dairy farm not far from Llandysul. Small, neat, purposeful, the Fergie revolutionised what we could do with our land. Obviously, with only 7 acres we couldn't do that much in the first place, but what we could do we did much more effectively and efficiently. I had never seen a tractor up close before, never seen a three-point hitch, a PTO, or a stabiliser. I remember the way the bonnet used to fold forward, the smell of TVO, and the ROPS my dad put on it, incongruously green against the grey of the body.
After we moved from the smallholding to the farm, whose neglected 50 acres seemed huge by comparison, we discovered that one of the lower pastures had turned in the space of a few days into a sea of buttercups. I have never seen so much ranunculus so densely packed, before or since. My father ploughed it with the TE20, leaving gleaming black rows of sod, then harrowed it. After that we children helped him stone the field, walking behind the Fergie pulling a roller with a wooden box bolted on top of it. Every time we saw a stone, we threw it in the box.
That field was the first time that my father let me drive the tractor, or indeed anything. It was a large pasture and there was nothing I could really hit, but that didn't stop me from freezing into target fixation as we approached one of the hedges, and eventually he had to reach forward from where he was perched on the mudguard and haul the wheel to the left to stop us careering into the drainage ditch.
From those few days I remember vividly the Fergie's hand throttle pointing off at the horizon, my lurching attempts to use clutch and gears, and the foot brake with a ratchet-like lug that allowed it to be used as kind of handbrake if you stamped on it. And buttercup pollen everywhere, coating our trousers and boots like gold dust as we surveyed the field in flowers up to our hips.
Today, I want a tractor of my own, and although I have a lot of affection for the TE20, I wouldn't want one in 2020. Ours was old when we were using it in the late 1970s, and it felt underpowered even then. And hobby farmers, of which I suppose I am one, have long since driven prices up to silly levels. I like looking at them in the vintage section of the local agricultural shows, but only for the twinge of nostalgia.
Here's why I would like a tractor. I have 25 acres, of which about 18 is permanent pasture, grazed by sheep and beef cattle on tack from a local farmer, who takes good care of it. The remainder is woodland, including a couple of what were once paddocks, which I am slowly clearing. When I finish clearing the paddocks, the smaller one, a bit less than an acre, is probably going to be turned into an orchard. The larger one, about two acres, might just become a meadow for a while until I decide what to do with it.
The remaining woodland will be managed for domestic firewood. I'm doing this for fun and exercise, as I work at home in a desk job. I like messing around (carefully) with trees, chainsaws, saw horses and log splitters, and I like stacking and burning my own wood. I can buy in wood if I choose, and I choose not to.
Now that I have started to fell bits of the 2-acre woodland, the amount of firewood is increasing to the point where I'm starting to struggle with storage. I have no large outbuildings, so I can't just throw the split lots into a pile in a corner of a barn. Having thought about how to organise it, it seems to me that the best way would be to have them in IBC cages (a bit expensive) or something similar, or in big bags on pallets. I can't store these in the garden because the wife would throw them out, and me after them, so I plan to leave the pallets / bags / cages where I process them and bring them to the house later. I reckon I'd need 5-6 such pallets each winter. Incidentally, although the land is quite well-drained, most winters the fields get so wet that you'd ruin them if you went on in any conventional vehicle (the beasts are taken off for the duration).
Problem. How do I get the logs to the house, which is several hundred yards away across sloped and bumpy fields, 12-18 months down the road? I don't think it's feasible to handball logs back in a wheelbarrow, and an IBC cage or a big bag is far too large to be pushed around manually. I feel like I'm teetering on a shift like the one that took us from the small square bales of my youth (we used the Fergie with a finger mower and a borrowed baler for that too) to round bales. Once you cross that Rubicon, human power is no longer enough.
My conclusion is that I'll need a tractor. If I succeed in clearing the paddocks and move on to the next phase I'll probably need a mower, maybe a rotovator, and a transport box or small trailer. All that seems to me to be well within the remit of the usual 15-20hp mini-tractors, the smaller Kubota and Iseki models. The fly in the ointment is that a pallet full of logs could weigh up to 500kg, depending on moisture and type of wood, and I don't see something like a 30-year Yanmar with 18hp lifting up 350kg 24 inches behind the bar ends.
Ideally I'd like something with 50hp or so, in great nick with low hours, a nice cab and all mod cons, a bit like the Kubota L5040 that JE Rees in Drefach Felindre has in at the moment. I could get something decent at £15,000, but it's not going to happen on a budget of £3,000-5,000. If my income doesn't collapse as a result of the global coronavirus lockdown, I might be able to afford a bit more between now and this time next year, but it'd be hard to justify unless depreciation was so low that I could expect to get most of my money back when I sold it. This is a hobby after all, and while firewood helps cut my heating bills, it's not going to save me twenty grand over the next ten years.
While I don't really need that much horsepower (probably 30 would do it?), I have been thinking that maybe a bigger, older tractor would work, something with sturdy enough hydraulics to pick up 500kg without complaint. What sticks in my mind is that when it became clear that the TE20 couldn't handle everything it was being asked to do, my dad went out and bought a very tall, narrow Zetor with a huge cab, from a farm somewhere near Lampeter.
Looking at pictures today I think it was a 57xx or something. The Zetor turned out to be, not to put too fine a point on it, a real shitter, and worked only infrequently. My dad didn't have the mechanical nous to fix it properly, so it just limped along (on those rare occasions we could get it started), while the TE20 soldiered on gamely. My spannering skills are no better than those of my late father, and I have nowhere under cover to work on a vehicle. I don't want to buy something ancient and end up with it mouldering in a corner of the yard, and upsetting me every time I see it. The Defender pickup's bad enough, and that still nominally works, though it's SORNed and used only on the grounds now.
So what should I do? Buy a mobile scrap heap for a couple of grand and hope it doesn't collapse into its constituent parts? Save money for a year and buy something smaller and newer for eight grand? Rob a bank and buy an Avant 640? Fortunately time is on my side, so I can afford to spend the next 6 months or so pondering the matter - and asking the great and good of the forum for their opinions.
Cheers
Dan
PS first post - please be gentle!
After we moved from the smallholding to the farm, whose neglected 50 acres seemed huge by comparison, we discovered that one of the lower pastures had turned in the space of a few days into a sea of buttercups. I have never seen so much ranunculus so densely packed, before or since. My father ploughed it with the TE20, leaving gleaming black rows of sod, then harrowed it. After that we children helped him stone the field, walking behind the Fergie pulling a roller with a wooden box bolted on top of it. Every time we saw a stone, we threw it in the box.
That field was the first time that my father let me drive the tractor, or indeed anything. It was a large pasture and there was nothing I could really hit, but that didn't stop me from freezing into target fixation as we approached one of the hedges, and eventually he had to reach forward from where he was perched on the mudguard and haul the wheel to the left to stop us careering into the drainage ditch.
From those few days I remember vividly the Fergie's hand throttle pointing off at the horizon, my lurching attempts to use clutch and gears, and the foot brake with a ratchet-like lug that allowed it to be used as kind of handbrake if you stamped on it. And buttercup pollen everywhere, coating our trousers and boots like gold dust as we surveyed the field in flowers up to our hips.
Today, I want a tractor of my own, and although I have a lot of affection for the TE20, I wouldn't want one in 2020. Ours was old when we were using it in the late 1970s, and it felt underpowered even then. And hobby farmers, of which I suppose I am one, have long since driven prices up to silly levels. I like looking at them in the vintage section of the local agricultural shows, but only for the twinge of nostalgia.
Here's why I would like a tractor. I have 25 acres, of which about 18 is permanent pasture, grazed by sheep and beef cattle on tack from a local farmer, who takes good care of it. The remainder is woodland, including a couple of what were once paddocks, which I am slowly clearing. When I finish clearing the paddocks, the smaller one, a bit less than an acre, is probably going to be turned into an orchard. The larger one, about two acres, might just become a meadow for a while until I decide what to do with it.
The remaining woodland will be managed for domestic firewood. I'm doing this for fun and exercise, as I work at home in a desk job. I like messing around (carefully) with trees, chainsaws, saw horses and log splitters, and I like stacking and burning my own wood. I can buy in wood if I choose, and I choose not to.
Now that I have started to fell bits of the 2-acre woodland, the amount of firewood is increasing to the point where I'm starting to struggle with storage. I have no large outbuildings, so I can't just throw the split lots into a pile in a corner of a barn. Having thought about how to organise it, it seems to me that the best way would be to have them in IBC cages (a bit expensive) or something similar, or in big bags on pallets. I can't store these in the garden because the wife would throw them out, and me after them, so I plan to leave the pallets / bags / cages where I process them and bring them to the house later. I reckon I'd need 5-6 such pallets each winter. Incidentally, although the land is quite well-drained, most winters the fields get so wet that you'd ruin them if you went on in any conventional vehicle (the beasts are taken off for the duration).
Problem. How do I get the logs to the house, which is several hundred yards away across sloped and bumpy fields, 12-18 months down the road? I don't think it's feasible to handball logs back in a wheelbarrow, and an IBC cage or a big bag is far too large to be pushed around manually. I feel like I'm teetering on a shift like the one that took us from the small square bales of my youth (we used the Fergie with a finger mower and a borrowed baler for that too) to round bales. Once you cross that Rubicon, human power is no longer enough.
My conclusion is that I'll need a tractor. If I succeed in clearing the paddocks and move on to the next phase I'll probably need a mower, maybe a rotovator, and a transport box or small trailer. All that seems to me to be well within the remit of the usual 15-20hp mini-tractors, the smaller Kubota and Iseki models. The fly in the ointment is that a pallet full of logs could weigh up to 500kg, depending on moisture and type of wood, and I don't see something like a 30-year Yanmar with 18hp lifting up 350kg 24 inches behind the bar ends.
Ideally I'd like something with 50hp or so, in great nick with low hours, a nice cab and all mod cons, a bit like the Kubota L5040 that JE Rees in Drefach Felindre has in at the moment. I could get something decent at £15,000, but it's not going to happen on a budget of £3,000-5,000. If my income doesn't collapse as a result of the global coronavirus lockdown, I might be able to afford a bit more between now and this time next year, but it'd be hard to justify unless depreciation was so low that I could expect to get most of my money back when I sold it. This is a hobby after all, and while firewood helps cut my heating bills, it's not going to save me twenty grand over the next ten years.
While I don't really need that much horsepower (probably 30 would do it?), I have been thinking that maybe a bigger, older tractor would work, something with sturdy enough hydraulics to pick up 500kg without complaint. What sticks in my mind is that when it became clear that the TE20 couldn't handle everything it was being asked to do, my dad went out and bought a very tall, narrow Zetor with a huge cab, from a farm somewhere near Lampeter.
Looking at pictures today I think it was a 57xx or something. The Zetor turned out to be, not to put too fine a point on it, a real shitter, and worked only infrequently. My dad didn't have the mechanical nous to fix it properly, so it just limped along (on those rare occasions we could get it started), while the TE20 soldiered on gamely. My spannering skills are no better than those of my late father, and I have nowhere under cover to work on a vehicle. I don't want to buy something ancient and end up with it mouldering in a corner of the yard, and upsetting me every time I see it. The Defender pickup's bad enough, and that still nominally works, though it's SORNed and used only on the grounds now.
So what should I do? Buy a mobile scrap heap for a couple of grand and hope it doesn't collapse into its constituent parts? Save money for a year and buy something smaller and newer for eight grand? Rob a bank and buy an Avant 640? Fortunately time is on my side, so I can afford to spend the next 6 months or so pondering the matter - and asking the great and good of the forum for their opinions.
Cheers
Dan
PS first post - please be gentle!
