When my tractor man announced a few months ago that he was “having a baby” — as modern men do — I offered him my heartiest congratulations and told him to take as much time as necessary.
felt only the slightest twinge of anxiety that all essential field operations would fall to me in his absence.
With most of my working day confined to the farm office, I’m not match fit when it comes to the actual hands-on work in the fields.
So I tried to convince myself that this switch to tractor driver for the week would be a timely reminder of the basics of the business I run.
There are few jobs that so thoroughly capture the realities of modern farming like spraying.
Not only is it highly time-sensitive, it is weather-dependent and demanding in terms of precision. You can easily have €1,000 worth of chemicals in the tank, and they have to go on at exactly the right amount to prevent any wastage, but also to protect rather than poison the crop.
And that’s before we mention anything about protecting the environment.
They say that pressure is for tyres, but I can tell you that I was feeling a fair degree of it as I grappled with the complexities of rates, recommendations, nozzle specs and GPS systems in the cab of my tractor last week.
Rallying
Gone are the days of lashing a few glugs of whatever you’re having yourself in the top of the sprayer, sticking on the PTO, and rallying up and down the field for a couple of runs.
The multi-billion-dollar Round-up lawsuits in train in the US, along with environmentalists breathing down our necks about every input used on the farm, were rattling through my head as I cranked up my lovely new digital scales to measure out the powers to the nearest gram.
The barrage of phone-calls, emails and texts were a constant distraction during a job that is merciless if you make an error.
Most of the products going through the tank are a poison of one sort or another. Granted, a fungicide might be harmless enough for everything bar your target fungus, but it’s still not the sort of stuff that you want heading for the nearest water drain.
Which is exactly what was happening when I took yet another phone-call while filling the tank. I stepped around the corner to get away from the tractor’s revs that were powering the pump sucking from the water tank.
It only seemed like a few seconds, but the next thing I heard was splashes of water as it glugged out though the top of the sprayer.
It was easy to switch off the suction, but it took me another few vital seconds to remember that there was a bucket of sand in the shed that I could use to block the path of the contaminated water heading for the nearest drain.
Having the likes of these spillage mitigation measures are the things that I huff and puff about when filling out endless audits, but this was a timely reminder of their importance, no matter how pesky they might seem to be.
Filling the sprayer is only the first step of the job, of course.
The real skill starts in the field, where handling a 24m-wide boom feels a bit like trying to watch an end-to-end tennis match from too close to the sideline.
Since my last attempt working the machine six months previously, we got the height sensors fixed so the ever-adjusting booms pleasantly pulsed their way up and down along the tramlines.
Courtesy of my new best friend, Mick, the sprayer mechanic, I also got my head around the GPS — a remarkable piece of technology.
It effortlessly pinged on and off nozzles along the boom as I wove my web around the field, all the while measuring the area covered to the nearest square metre.
When it works, that is.
Like any piece of IT, it had its moments when ‘computor says no’ and you sit there helpless as a child on the side of a hill wondering what to do next.
And even when the machine was doing exactly what it says on the tin, I kept finding other kinks in the system. The area on the GPS wasn’t tallying with the area that the machine was reading via the distance travelled by the tractor.
Cue another call to Mick, and the realisation that my switch to narrow wheels the previous week had thrown the settings built into the tractor for distance.
But my lack of practice also pushed the limits of the machine’s strength.
Engineering
Narrow corners saw me test the Amazone’s (admittedly impressive) engineering on a wide variety of whitethorn, bramble and elder trees.
Wet spots where the driver should slow well down in advance were ignored until it was too late and the tractor and sprayer were jolted violently to one side, with the boom again taking the brunt as it was forced into the ground by a feckless driver.
However, by 7.30pm on Saturday, I arrived in the door knackered, but satisfied that the machine was back in the yard, mostly in one piece, and the product was out on the crops. Exactly how well that weed-killer was applied will be on show in east Meath for the next two months.
I’ll be hiding in my office.
Darragh McCullough runs a mixed farm enterprise in Meath www.elmgrovefarm.ie
