Small but perfickly formed

Earlier I was writing about how well we'd done this year w.r.t. processing the traditional hay-meadow into, like, hay. But the title to that piece Haircuts All Round, was a very partial account. 

In parallel this year we found, hidden in plain sight in the next village a traditional hay-mower. Years ago, when we first blew in, there was a agéd farmer who could still wrastle a pair of horses into harness and have them draw a plough to turn sod. We came this ⇐⇒ far from getting him up to work for us, but it never happened and then he died. Séan The Mow is about my age and owns an MF135 tractor which is older than any of our children. It's super-dinky and he's super careful. Young chaps with big tractors tend to race around like it was a cross-country rally both on road and off- [Séan's opinion]. 

For small buckety field with doubtful margins, tearing around is a recipe for >!kerChang!< broken kit when, say, a mowing bar meets a lump of granite which has tumbled off the field boundary into the long grass. We have two fields on the far side of the world lane which we really need for grazing between {15 Apr and 01 Jul} when the main paddocks are going All Trad.  Being under-stocked, these fields tend to grow bracken Pteridium aquilinum and rushes Juncus ?effusus. In 2022, it took me 2½ hours to scythe the most bracken-jungly small corner of one field. I was only 68 then - a fit young stripling; but as an annual solution it's barely sustainable. Séan did the whole field in the same time: bracken thistles rushes gorse and miscellaneous thatch all together. See [L] that could, the little MF135 taking it handy. Being so small means that the tractor can e a s e  its way through any small gate no matter how tight the turn, and also up a real narrow uneven slope between two trees to reach the top step of the field.

Part of the contract was to mow a sadly neglected heritage apple orchard at the bottom of the field over the lane. [Above] you can see Séan making a start on that task. His fully extend rig is less than half the width of the Big Boys Tonka Toys which were roaring around the bigger fields. Volume is the cube of linear dimensions, so those tractors are 2 x 2 x 2, call it 10x the size of the humble MF135:

• MF135 45 horsepower = 31kW; 1.4 tonnes in her socks
• Claas Arion 630 = 121kW; 6.6 tonnes

Apart from anything else, the bigger tractor is nearly 4x more powerful but 5x heavier and will compact the soil that much worse. Leaving the footprint which will absorb less rain and send the water down hill to cause flash floods downstream as well as ripping out the pearl mussels Margaritifera margaritifera and riparian trees. This MF135 is held together, literally, with baler-twine and, metaphorically, with prayer. The inset shows the lucozade bottle half full of bar oil which miraculously sits on a I-beam above the PTO - convenient to its task. No matter how lumpy the field or pot-holey the road to the job, this bottle never bounces out of its trough to be lost.