The John Griff Column: The right tool for the job…

Look at the picture here – notice anything?

Taken a couple of days ago while I was walking the dogs, you see a farmer going about his seasonal jobs, cutting back low lying vegetation in a recently harvested field of rape?

Anything else?

I refer you to the farmer’s tractor, it’s age and it’s size. If you went to the acclaimed Hollowell Heavy Horse and Steam Show earlier in the month, you might have seen a number of similar machines, lovingly kept running or restored by their owners in the historic or veterans section of the event. Here then is a prime example of a Massey Ferguson 35, doing precisely what it was first designed and built to do. Working.

Produced between 1956 and 1964, different iterations of the MF 35 had a 3 or 4 cylinder engine, which produced between 37 and 44 horsepower. In a Henry Ford-esque move, almost all of them were painted red and grey. When he set up his farm in Devon in the 60s, my late uncle equipped himself with two such tractors – both of them Massey Fergusion 35s. They still exist, albeit that one is in pieces, keeping the other going as a parts donor. The intact one still does exactly as our pictured farmer’s. It works.

Without labouring the point, these wonderful machines are not only working in the modern age, they are doing so over well over sixty years since manufacture. Simple to operate and maintain, they have repeatedly paid back the investment made in their purchase and will continue to do so for as long as parts can be found for them. Such was the genius of their design – nothing electronic to go wrong, engineered for the job and more than capable of doing it.  

My uncle’s farm now belongs to my cousin. Beyond inheriting it and its machinery (without inheritance tax problems), Justin has a couple of his own tractors. By comparison they are behemoths, much bigger in every dimension, heavier, massively more complicated, thirstier to fuel and likely to have a shorter working life. You might ask why he runs them. The answer is that they too have been engineered for the job, working larger farms and fields, pulling heavier and more efficient equipment. Justin’s farm is far smaller than those of the clients he services as a contractor. Their needs are greater, so he has to be able to bring the right equipment for the job if he is to win it. He works his Case machines hard and uses the Massey for lighter tasks. Ask him which machine gives him the greater pleasure in use though, and he’ll nod at the little 35. I completely understand this – as a small child I used to ride on a trailer early in the morning, taking still-warm milk churns to the collecting stand at the top of the farm drive, before going in to breakfast. The trailer was towed by the Massey.

I was due to take a picture for the village calendar on Monday night. Stupidly, I had left batteries in my camera before storing it. Over quite a period of time they had leaked acid into the plastic casing. Kicking myself for the oversight, there was nothing that could be done and I threw the stricken camera away, using a different machine for the shot. Gallingly, I had been brought up to care for tools and belongings. In work, I cover my microphones, keep my recorders in hard cases, and store my lights, mixers and cables in a container away from the house. It means I get more life out of equipment that others abuse and discard – I’ve seen it happen. Maybe I’m more sensitive to it because, like Justin, I worked hard to buy the kit in the first place.

Having the right equipment for the job is something which will hopefully be much in evidence shortly. Just over a week ago the renovation and replacement of some of the gates at the canal locks south of Stoke Bruerne was announced by the Canal and River Trust. Supported by the Postcode Lottery, the work will be done this winter using what’s described as ‘traditional techniques’. Some modern machinery will rightly come into play – but I hope that those techniques will also allow onlookers of all ages to see how the right tools get the job done right – from back then, and now.