New Member Introduction & The Farm

   / New Member Introduction & The Farm #1  

Grrrr

Platinum Member
Joined
Jul 17, 2007
Messages
800
Location
Devon, UK
Tractor
John Deere!
Well, having been a lurker here for ages I think it is time I say hello. I live on a farm in the UK where we keep our horses. We have about 80ac of land which is cut for hay twice a year and the rest of the time is grazed by cattle and sheep from our next door neighbours farm. Their farm is mainly poultry but they also keep some livestock. They mainly operate older MF tractors.

(All the pictures are 640 x 480)



This is our Massey Ferguson 135 with the Link Box


I have been driving tractors for a while now having started at about 11. I work on our neighbours farm during school holidays and on weekends during busy times. Being a livestock farm there is not that much machinery involved but there is still lots to do.
  • Rolling and Harrowing during the Spring
  • Fertiliser Spreading a bit later on and after the first silage cut
  • Wrapped Bale Silaging
  • Topping during the summer
  • Haymaking in the summer
  • Feeding cattle through the winter
The majority of our land is quite flat but some of the fields have quite a slope on them and you have to be a bit careful on them. We have land that boarders a river and always floods and rushes and stingy nettles come up. We like to cut this for hay so it has to be sprayes each year to kill of the weeds. We also have about 20 ac of woods that we are tring to manage. We are currently trying to reinstate a track that goes through the top of the woods which has been overgrown for about 35 years having been neglected by the previous owners.

Machinery
Our main tractor at the moment is a Massey Ferguson 135 from about 1971. It does all of the rolling on our land as well as the neighbours, topping, powering the square baler and all of the work around the house and garden.

I also drive our neighbours tractors but they like their old tractors so there is not much in the way of modern luxuries. They have all Massey Ferguson tractors, a 165, 165 with a loader and a 595. They all come from the 70's.

Hopefully we will soon be getting a new (old) tractor with a FEL with about 75 hp to allow us to do more hay and to drive a round baler. Currently all of the round baling is done by a contractor. We want to operate our own round baler to allow us to chose when we bale rather than when the contractor wants to.

Making Horse Hay

This is the main thing that we do on the farm and something we would like to do more of in the future. This year we will be cutting about 40 ac to sell as horse hay. This would normally have been cut and baled by now but we have had so much rain that it has so far been impossible to start haying. Hopefully we we will be cutting next week and I will post more about this.


We also have this little mower that we use to cut our lawn. It is a Husqvarna LT151 and is way to small for our needs. It is definitely going to be the next machine to be traded in. I made this little box to go on the back of it in place of the grass collector. It is quite usefull to carry tools around in. Here we were using it to pull a plank around some stakes to create a curve to finish off a retaining wall we were making.




Hope that wasn't too boring and I will post some more pics when we finally manage to start cutting more hay. (If it ever stops raining!) :rolleyes:

P.S. I hope I posted this in the right place :confused:

Jake
 
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   / New Member Introduction & The Farm #2  
Welcome aboard Jake. Nice intro and pics. A like the retaining wall also.
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm
  • Thread Starter
#3  
Thanks, the wall has taken me and my grandad long enough! Hopefully we will be cutting hay tomorrow if the weather stays nice :)

Jake
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm #4  
Jake:

Glad to have you as a member. That's beautiful country in your pictures.

Do you store your hay in a barn or do you sell it as soon as it is baled?

It is so dry here in the southeastern US (Georgia) that we havn't got the first cutting of hay yet. Normally we would be preparing for the second cut of coastal bermuda grass hay. Since there is certain to be a shortage of "grass" hay, many farmers will substitute hay from peanut plant vines. The peanuts are the "cash" crop, and the vines are so coarse and hard to bale that they are usually just left in the field to be plowed under in the fall.

Welcome to the group.
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm
  • Thread Starter
#5  
The first cutting we did back in May was silage. We have it baled in round bales and wrap it. Our neighbours buy most of this off us to feed to their cattle. They can store it outside as it is wrapped. We do not normally have good enough weather to make hay from the first cuts. We take the hay we need from the second cut for our horses and put that in our barn and the rest we either store in a dutch barn untill it sells or, as last year, we sold it all to a feed merchant who took it away as fast as we could bale it!

Jake
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm #6  
Welcome to the forum!!! glad you resized the pics. great for us guys still on dial up! who installed the Rops on the massey? don't beleive they were standard in the 70's might be wrong about that, but what the heck not the 1st nor the last time i was wrong.....
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm
  • Thread Starter
#7  
You can buy roll bars for most older tractors here in the UK. I fitted it onto this tractor, it just bolts on to the rear axle into holes that are allready there. Not all the tractors we use have roll bars but we try to keep them away from the hills.
Jake
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm #8  
Welcome to Tractor by Net. Glad that you finely decided to join the membership. It is quite interesting having members from other countries. Please feel free to post and show pictures of your endeavors. Once again, Welcome.
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm #9  
Welcome, Jake!

My wife is from the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors and I've always envied how beautiful the farms are there, along with the Vale of York. My mother and her family is from Herefordshire, just a bit north of you. I visit ever year and do my best to make the best scrumpy and perry... the kind strong enough to let you see through time and space. Until the hangover.

Thanks for sharing the photos.
 
   / New Member Introduction & The Farm #10  
Welcome Jake,
Thanks for taking the time to write about your tractoring over in UK and for sharing those photos. I'd like to hear more about your land and such. I presume you farm for a living then?
 
 
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