Marching On

I am not sure if I can make this story read as funny as it would have looked, were anyone there to look, or as terrifying as it actually was, but I’ll do my best to describe my first tractor driving experience and yes, you may laugh.

This little old chap, pictured above, is part of our farm labour saving initiative. There’s a lot to be said in these uncertain times for running a farm on a human scale, that is, assuming you have a team of humans at your disposal. When you’re just one little woman running a farm pretty much alone with only a husband for weekend help, there’s also a lot to said for saving labour where you can. So when our neighbour, who we’ve depended heavily on for the past year to move our big bales (nobody makes small, human-scale hay bales anymore) and bring us barrels of water from the river on the back of his tractor, extended an arm with an offer to go halves with us on a little tractor that we would have day-to-day use of, we gratefully reached out and accepted. Sharing a little pre-loved vintage tractor with a neighbour to take up some of the heavy lifting around here seems like a pretty good compromise on the costs of convenience for labour saving, easing our dependency on the kindness of our neighbours before it wears too thin and an exercise in community building. I wonder if this is the kind of thing we might call radical neighbouring.

I have never driven a tractor before, let alone a tractor that’s older than me and as stiff and cranky as you’d expect for its hard-worn years. But I what I lack in tractor driving experience I more than make up for in bullheaded impetuousness. I can drive a car, quite competently if I may brag just a little. How different can it be?! So as soon as our neighbour had dropped it off, given us a brief rundown on what’s what and left us to get acquainted with our new steed, up I clambered into the saddle.

I soon inadvertently discovered, while gently trundling out of the gateway in reverse, that this deceptively sweet and harmless looking little old tractor has a Turbo Boost pedal (also known as the foot throttle) confusingly located where the brake pedal would be in any normal vehicle. One tap of my toes and the beast took off like a wild bronco, leapt straight out across the road and, still in reverse, attempted to climb the five foot high bank to our goat’s house. “CARLY! BRAKE!” my husband yelled as if I were out for a thrill ride and somehow in control. “I CAN’T! I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS!” I screamed back at him and in a moment of sheer terror as the beast bucked and lurched off the bank and took a dive down the road in a reverse gallop, I did what any sane rider who values their own life would do: I released the reins, relinquished my futile fight for control, stood up, reached for the door and attempted to jump horse. Abandon ship. This thing was going down and I was damned if I was going with it. However, my attempt to escape the wheels of certain death was blocked by a) the door, which doesn’t shut properly and was swinging wildly back in my face with every slamming lurch, and b) my husband hanging onto the wildly swinging door, air-running along beside the backward galloping beast in a vain but valiant attempt to jump aboard and rescue me.

Through all this our tractor, apparently having a lot of fun with its free rein under the incompetent charge of amateurs, veered sharply back across the road and with precision aim ploughed directly through our neighbour’s field gate which folded under us like a domino, spun a complete donut and finally crashed with a stomach-hurling crunch into our neighbour’s ditch (not the same neighbour with whom we share the tractor, but a largely absent neighbour who hasn’t quite got the gist of how this little neighbourhood works yet, and who fortunately wasn’t around). I leaped from the sputtering machine before it had a chance to recover itself and take off again, and while I helpfully jumped up and down yelling “QUICK! GET IT OUT OF HERE BEFORE ANYONE SEES!” my daring husband swiftly seised his opportunity to climb aboard, took control of the monster in its moment of vulnerability, kicked it out of the ditch and into submission and limped it quietly home.

Our neighbour’s gate was stood back up undamaged (all the gates around here, and probably on rural farms all over, are tied to their posts with bale string, hence it falling like a domino when the bale string snapped under pressure and which I’m now seeing is an ingenious safety mechanism) and our breakaway steed was light enough not to leave a track. We quietly locked it up securely for the night, gave it a pat on the bonnet and casually limped away to tend our bruises. It never happened. You all know nothing, right.

They say, and it’s a motto I lived by when I was a little bit younger and braver and still had a lot to prove, that if you fall off a horse you should get right back on, before you lose your nerve. Well this time I lost my nerve somewhere between discovering the Turbo Boost pedal and landing in our neighbour’s ditch, and I haven’t found it yet. Still, now we have a tractor, we are Real Farmers, even if it’s just sitting there looking pretty most of the time. Fortunately, my husband has some limited experience of driving a tractor before and he’s quite enjoying putting some manners into the old bronc while I stand back and watch from a safe distance, so I’m letting him have this one.

Besides bringing our own haylage bales down to the winter feeding yard, he’s had old David Brown carry pallets, fenceposts, rolls of galvanised sheep wire and 50kg bags of granular lime to where they’re needed around the farm—all the heavy, donkey work that we would have laboriously used our own backs for and left ourselves too beaten to actually complete the jobs we set out to do. Funny how I still can’t shake the need to justify burning a couple of litres of diesel to save our backs and free our time and human strengths for more productive endeavours in the work of growing food and fibre and making a living on the land while the world continues to drop bombs and build energy guzzling data centres. While we all, myself included, think nothing of taking out the car for every little errand. We might even be able to cut and bale our own (small, human-scale bales of) hay with this light little tractor that barely leaves a track, ultimately cutting out a lot of the trucking in of winter feed by contractors with massive machines and aiding in our efforts toward the more closed loop and localised system we’re aiming for.

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