Little Red Tractor

So part of, well really a lot of my job, when it didn't involve sheep, involved driving the tractor, sometimes for 11hours a  day! That is a Case III, 220hp tractor, with wheels taller than I am.


Actually it's quite easy to drive a tractor, you just put it in gear and steer. if you want to go faster, you click it up another gear. Simple!






I started off with the harrows. A 32ft piece of machinery which basically breaks off and flattens all the stubble in a paddock. you drive up and down, up and down all day. The thing you have to remember is, you have a width of 32ft behind you. That's quite a turning circle at the end of the row. You also have to lift it to go over rocks, and you can't reverse them, so no getting stuck in corners. Really you do have to just go quite slowly. these particular harrows were also pretty twisted so untangling them every so often was also necessary, and quite annoying.

Then there were the harrows that didn't just break and flatten the stubble but gathered it up to be dropped in rows. Not only do you have to look out for rocks and other obstacles; not get stuck in corners; watch your turning circles; but you also have to watch your rows to ensure you're lifting the harrows at the right moment to drop the stubble in perfect lines across the paddock. Eventually one of the hydraulic rams started leaking and that was the end of the harrowing, left out in the middle of a paddock, probably for years to come.

But not the end of the tractor work. Once the paddocks had been harrowed and burnt (next entry) then they had to be sown.
The seeder here was a horrible machine, well maybe not really. It was actually quite straight forward: 2 seed bins, one for grain, one for fine seeds; a bin for fertilizer (or supa); a series of cogs and chains to release the seed at the right rate (which was determined by an equation I can't remember); a row of oscillating disks at the front to dig the furrows; double disks behind each furrow to guide the seeds in; and a press wheel behind to cover the seed. In theory, quite simple.
The horrible part was how many little things could go wrong: A disk fall off; a press wheel fall off; a seed tube fall off; a seed tube get blocked; bearings in the disks disintegrating; one disk sowing too deep; a disk sowing too shallow; the release rate too fast or too slow. Just loads of little things. You have to stop every 15mins just to check everything was working okay. Luckily it was all easy enough to fix and if it wasn't, there were enough spare parts around to just replace the offending part.
The machine itself (for anyone actually interested) was a Great Plains Seeder from Texas. Apparently a load of them got dumped in Australia quite cheap when a deal with Japan I think, fell through. Just a little trivia for you.

Actually using the machine was quite simple. Things to remember with this one were... you can't go around corners because it bends the disks. So you have to lift it up at the end of rows, and every time you want to go around anything. The paddocks really do look like obstacle courses for tractor drivers!

In my time at Wallendbeen I must have sown just about everything; oats, wheat, conola, mustard, mixed grasses which I had the fun of mixing beforehand. I really did get quite skilled with the seeder; fixing it; judging the depth to lower it to; the width of the rows so they lined up nicely on each pass; judging how many hectares I could do before needing a refill; backing up to the grain bin. That was the fun one. Going from having never backed a trailer before to backing a huge tractor and equally big piece of machinery to a very exact spot next to the grain bin. There was very little room for error and I always had to do it myself. I'll confess... despite mastering that bit of backing, I still can't back a pick up and little trailer at all.

I managed though, and I really do not know how many hours I did in the tractor or how many acres I covered. I do know that some paddocks I did were 100acres a paddock and I did dozens of them, well at least a dozen. what with harrowing and sowing I probably would have covered at least 800acres at Wallendbeen, which is one hell of an introduction to tractor driving. And despite it normally meaning ridiculously long hours on my own, it was probably some of the most enjoyable work I did there. At least I felt I'd achieved something at the end of the day!