Stories and Articles

All in a days work ...

by Brian Martyn

It's breakfast time, the telephone rings, a lorry load of fertiliser will be arriving in an hour. Fine. Catch up with some smaller jobs and feed the cows their main feed of silage after dinner. (It’s important to remember in this story that half an inch of rain fell the night before and the lorry driver was one and a half hours late).

Soon it is one o’clock.  With my meal almost finished the lorry driver knocks on the door and ask where I want it delivered. I quickly find out that it is an articulated lorry, not what is required but the driver is very confident ………..he is stuck within 60 seconds because of the rain. With 16 tons removed the driver is still quite confident he will be out soon…………so he thinks as he is only 6 feet away from the duck pond and sliding at every attempt. I hitch on the tractor and he is now 4 feet away from the pond but both lorry and tractor are now only 2 foot away from a 3 foot drop into water, mud and tadpoles.

Time for another think!

Enlisting help from Jason next door with a 100hp 4wheel drive we are still not moving. The driver is not so confident now………..and admits he is not used to delivering to farms and is starting to get concerned that the whole lot may turn over when Robert the Rep, (who sold me the fertiliser) and was passing, arrived purely by chance?

We have another go by hitching up 2 tractors and dragging it out the way it came in. Jason leaves, I pick up 2 broken tow chains and continue the work which has been left undone. It is now 5 o’clock and the cows are sounding a bit hungry. The lorry is ready leave but can’t move from my main yard which is not muddy, just wet. With the tractor hitched up again he is pulled out backwards into the lane where he has to reverse about 30foot before he is finally gone.

Time for tea and biscuits. By nine o’clock the stock have been fed and the slurry scraped away. I decided not to milk the cows as no feeding means very little milk, the last time that happened was over 20 years ago.

That is the third lorry in twelve months that needed major help after getting stuck. A little more thought from the drivers would help then I needn’t call Jason the Tractor Extractor.

p.s. Another caller that day was Phil Tucker with some magazines which needed delivering.