LEFT: A Fowler Challenger 22, just like the one operated by the Longfoots, pressing on with autumn ploughing with a Ransomes TS69.
Corn goes in,
BELOW: A County crawler could just about manage a set of 10ft 6in Pettit in 4th (2nd high) gear. Left turns were made most of the time as closing the discs for a right turn did not work very well.
beet comes up Turning the clock back to the early 1960s, retired farmer Peter Longfoot recalls some of the key machines his family were using to drill winter cereals and lift sugar beet on their farm in Huntingdonshire.
W
ell, autumn and now winter are upon us once again and the work continues. Back in 1963, the autumn drilling, which had taken place during October and just into November, was wrapped up and, as always, it was a relief to get all the planned winter wheat in the ground. That is except for the beet land which was ploughed, worked down and drilled as the beet was lifted. It was unheard of to drill wheat in September back then, maybe the winter barley in the last few days of the month, but definitely not wheat. The first wheat to be drilled in early October was on the ‘seeds’ ground that had been worked as a bastard fallow since the seeds hay crop had been taken. If it had remained dry then
RIGHT: This Caterpillar D7 is like the one that a local contractor used to do some heavy cultivating on the Longfoots’ farm. “Flat out at 1000rpm, it was impossible to rush these old girls, which plodded on at their speed regardless,” says Peter.
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on our farm this ground would have been pulled through several times with an old steam cultivator behind a Caterpillar D7, both owned by a local contractor. These steam cultivators would face anything, no matter how hard the ground. Even the road itself was no contest if the thing happened to drop down on the way to the next field! No one bothered about crawlers running down country roads in those days! If there had been a wet period of weather then the clover in the aftermath from the seeds mixture would have grown well, maybe to over a foot high, and this was then ploughed in. It was first rolled down and care was taken to roll it in the same direction as the
