New Member Introduction & The Farm

[Grrrr]

Well, having been a lurker here for ages I think it is time I say hello. I live on a farm in the UK where we keep our horses. We have about 80ac of land which is cut for hay twice a year and the rest of the time is grazed by cattle and sheep from our next door neighbours farm. Their farm is mainly poultry but they also keep some livestock. They mainly operate older MF tractors.

(All the pictures are 640 x 480)



This is our Massey Ferguson 135 with the Link Box


I have been driving tractors for a while now having started at about 11. I work on our neighbours farm during school holidays and on weekends during busy times. Being a livestock farm there is not that much machinery involved but there is still lots to do.

• Rolling and Harrowing during the Spring
• Fertiliser Spreading a bit later on and after the first silage cut
• Wrapped Bale Silaging
• Topping during the summer
• Haymaking in the summer
• Feeding cattle through the winter

The majority of our land is quite flat but some of the fields have quite a slope on them and you have to be a bit careful on them. We have land that boarders a river and always floods and rushes and stingy nettles come up. We like to cut this for hay so it has to be sprayes each year to kill of the weeds. We also have about 20 ac of woods that we are tring to manage. We are currently trying to reinstate a track that goes through the top of the woods which has been overgrown for about 35 years having been neglected by the previous owners.

Machinery
Our main tractor at the moment is a Massey Ferguson 135 from about 1971. It does all of the rolling on our land as well as the neighbours, topping, powering the square baler and all of the work around the house and garden.

I also drive our neighbours tractors but they like their old tractors so there is not much in the way of modern luxuries. They have all Massey Ferguson tractors, a 165, 165 with a loader and a 595. They all come from the 70's.

Hopefully we will soon be getting a new (old) tractor with a FEL with about 75 hp to allow us to do more hay and to drive a round baler. Currently all of the round baling is done by a contractor. We want to operate our own round baler to allow us to chose when we bale rather than when the contractor wants to.

Making Horse Hay

This is the main thing that we do on the farm and something we would like to do more of in the future. This year we will be cutting about 40 ac to sell as horse hay. This would normally have been cut and baled by now but we have had so much rain that it has so far been impossible to start haying. Hopefully we we will be cutting next week and I will post more about this.


We also have this little mower that we use to cut our lawn. It is a Husqvarna LT151 and is way to small for our needs. It is definitely going to be the next machine to be traded in. I made this little box to go on the back of it in place of the grass collector. It is quite usefull to carry tools around in. Here we were using it to pull a plank around some stakes to create a curve to finish off a retaining wall we were making.




Hope that wasn't too boring and I will post some more pics when we finally manage to start cutting more hay. (If it ever stops raining!)

P.S. I hope I posted this in the right place

Jake

 

[johnk]

Welcome aboard Jake. Nice intro and pics. A like the retaining wall also.

 

[Grrrr]

Thanks, the wall has taken me and my grandad long enough! Hopefully we will be cutting hay tomorrow if the weather stays nice

Jake

 

[Farmerford]

Jake:

Glad to have you as a member. That's beautiful country in your pictures.

Do you store your hay in a barn or do you sell it as soon as it is baled?

It is so dry here in the southeastern US (Georgia) that we havn't got the first cutting of hay yet. Normally we would be preparing for the second cut of coastal bermuda grass hay. Since there is certain to be a shortage of "grass" hay, many farmers will substitute hay from peanut plant vines. The peanuts are the "cash" crop, and the vines are so coarse and hard to bale that they are usually just left in the field to be plowed under in the fall.

Welcome to the group.

 

[Grrrr]

The first cutting we did back in May was silage. We have it baled in round bales and wrap it. Our neighbours buy most of this off us to feed to their cattle. They can store it outside as it is wrapped. We do not normally have good enough weather to make hay from the first cuts. We take the hay we need from the second cut for our horses and put that in our barn and the rest we either store in a dutch barn untill it sells or, as last year, we sold it all to a feed merchant who took it away as fast as we could bale it!

Jake

 

[frank_f15]

Welcome to the forum!!! glad you resized the pics. great for us guys still on dial up! who installed the Rops on the massey? don't beleive they were standard in the 70's might be wrong about that, but what the heck not the 1st nor the last time i was wrong.....

 

[Grrrr]

You can buy roll bars for most older tractors here in the UK. I fitted it onto this tractor, it just bolts on to the rear axle into holes that are allready there. Not all the tractors we use have roll bars but we try to keep them away from the hills.
Jake

 

[JerryG]

Welcome to Tractor by Net. Glad that you finely decided to join the membership. It is quite interesting having members from other countries. Please feel free to post and show pictures of your endeavors. Once again, Welcome.

 

[Greyfields]

Welcome, Jake!

My wife is from the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors and I've always envied how beautiful the farms are there, along with the Vale of York. My mother and her family is from Herefordshire, just a bit north of you. I visit ever year and do my best to make the best scrumpy and perry... the kind strong enough to let you see through time and space. Until the hangover.

Thanks for sharing the photos.

 

[3RRL]

Welcome Jake,
Thanks for taking the time to write about your tractoring over in UK and for sharing those photos. I'd like to hear more about your land and such. I presume you farm for a living then?

 

[flusher]

]


Hope that wasn't too boring and I will post some more pics when we finally manage to start cutting more hay. (If it ever stops raining!)

P.S. I hope I posted this in the right place

Jake

Welcome to TBN. Have fun.

I noticed the ROPS on your MF-135. Is that factory-installed or aftermarket? If the latter, who's the manufacturer?

I ask because I'm finishing a restoration on a 1964 MF-135 diesel and am debating whether to purchase a ROPS.

Also am looking forward to future pictures showing your haying operation. I have 10 acres of flat pasture that I intend to put into hay using the MF-135. Am looking for pre-owned haying implements now. Am interested in the implements you use for your operation.

 

[VA Rebel]

eh-low and welcome to TBN. Nice looking farm. We could use some of your weather here in the Upper South, we haven't seen any rain in a long time. We're gonna need a hurricane to catch up. Are y'all getting a lot of sprawl development in the UK?

 

[crbr]

Hi Jake. Thanks for the pics.

 

[VABlue]

I often travel to the Cambridge area (Huntingdon, to be exact) and can report that is some of the most beautiful farm country I've ever seen. Complete with concrete roads on the field edges for the tractors! Well, not all farms have that... The history of it all amazes me - most everything is hundreds of years old. I really like it over there...

 

[Grrrr]

Thankyou for all your kind comments. We do not farm for a living, we don't have enough land to do so. We only sell the hay we make. The land is rented to our neighbours when it is not growning for hay. They do farm for a living and have a poultry (eggs) farm.

I noticed the ROPS on your MF-135. Is that factory-installed or aftermarket? If the latter, who's the manufacturer?

I ask because I'm finishing a restoration on a 1964 MF-135 diesel and am debating whether to purchase a ROPS.

The roll bar was not a factory item and we have added it recently. The tractor came from the factory with a frame cab with just a roof. It had posts coming up where a normal roll bar attatches but also from the front of the footplates. It was very rusty and we did not think it would take the weight of the tractor so we replaced it. The new one is a universal one made to fit tractors about the size of the MF135. It is was made in England.

 

[Grrrr]

Here are some more pictures and a bit more history of the farm. Wre moved here two years ago. The house was first built in 1912. It burnt down in the 1930's and was rebuilt. The only part left standing was the chimney stack that runs up the middle of the house. Once the house was rebuilt it was owned for nearly 40 years by the same family. These then sold up in the 70's and it was bought by the people we bought it off. They let it run down alot and when we bought it it required completely refurbishing. This took over a year. It was finished in March last year. This is a picture of the house as of today.

(Lots of pictures, all 640 x 480)





The land was in better condition than the house but was still not very good. Here are some pictures of the land.




Looking out from the front of the house




Another view from the front of the house




Looking from the side of the house towards the sand school




Neighbours sheep in one of their fields




View from front lawn over the haha




Another view




Some trees on the front lawn




One of the fields waiting to be cut for hay




Our most productive hay field, allready been cut once this year




Another view




Again




Lawn behind the house




Back garden, just grass




Sand School




Again




Horse Paddocks

 

[Grrrr]

Some more pictures, this time going on down to the woods

(Again, all pics 640 x 480 clickable thumbnails)




Looking up the drive towards house (The hedges need cutting)




One of our steeper fields going down towards the river




Our neighbours sheep barn (The MF595 is just visible)




Looking down towardsthe river fields




Some sheep




And some more




Again, looking down towards the river fields (Our boundary is the treeline)




The steepest field we normally cut for hay (It has been grazed this year)




The river fields




Looking out across from the track that goes down to woods




Where the cattle feed during the winter




Track going to above place




We seem to have very good land for growing these thistle weeds!




One of the steeper fields




Looking back across it




And again




Shrubland above the track (Soon going to be cleared by a contractor and a big tractor)




Looking down towards the river from track




Looking back up the track

 

[Grrrr]

Last ones I promise!

(All pics clickable thumbnails at 640 x 480)




The track shown earlier cuts up through the middle of this slope




Entrance to the woods




A very muddy fields entrance (Hopefully we will be doing something about this soon)




Again, the woods entrance




The middle river field




Again (It is very boggy at the moment because of all the rain we have had)




The woods entrance




Looking down to the fields from the track




Again




The top of the track




Another




The field that we normally cut but not this year because it has been grazed




Another angle

I hope that you have enjoyed looking at these pictures. It also doesn't look as if we wil be cutting hay tomorrow as we have more bad bad weather forecasted

 

[Grrrr]

Did anyone find those photos interesting? (Soryy I posted so many)

 

[Red55]

ya I thought they were awesome! That's the thing with farming always something to do and never enough time to enjoy the views. Ed