A new arrival ...

After a month of Covid-related supply chain bottlenecks, our new tractor finally arrived. The shiny orange Kubota L4600 compact tractor looked too good to be true as its tender brought it up Cracroft Street to the farm. It is a gorgeous piece of machinery; forty six horsepower of grunt together with front loader bucket and a flail mower and a post hole digger as rear attachments. 

It has a hydrostatic transmission – a term which sounds great when you throw it out there, but one which leaves me a little bewildered in terms of actual meaning. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines hydrostatic as

“of or relating to fluids at rest or to the pressures they exert or transmit”

which, when applied to tractor transmission,  is as clear as hydraulic fluid to me. Suffice it to say that the tractor has a single large accelerator pedal, which if you depress the front part you move forward, and if you depress the rear portion you move backwards. There is no gear lever requiring the selection of a forward or reverse gear. The speed of the machine is controlled by the hand-operated throttle. This hydrostatic transmission makes the tractor incredibly easy to drive. Although I do notice on some farming websites that this feature is regarded as “fine for hobby farming” but that a manual transmission “is essential for real work”!

Just as he was leaving our salesperson told us the story of a recent delivery where the new owner failed to engage the park brake properly and had disengaged the hydrostatic system. He then watched in horror as his new machine ran away down the hill into his neighbour’s shed, where it destroyed a custom made boat and a Toyota Land Cruiser. Unfortunately, all this occurred before the new owner had insured the new tractor. We immediately parked the machine in the shed and rushed off to the house to organise insurance.

Later in the afternoon after the insurers had returned our calls, we took the beast out for spin in the top paddock. Just as in the early days of automobiles, Cath walked ahead with a white flag (actually it was a crowbar) to make sure no pesky rocks derailed our first outing. We then tested the flail mower by cutting the grass in the paddock – it was poetry in motion! 

Suddenly my back feels a whole lot better. Although Cath in an early evening pensive mood can only mean that the task list for tomorrow is likely to be on the longish side …