Brian Bell's Fifty Years of Farm Machinery has long been a standard book for enthusiasts. Although Brian can only show a random sample of the hundreds of implements and machines used on the land, in his new edition he has considerably expanded the work. To make the project more manageable, he has divided the subject into two parts, the first of which is to be published this December.
Seventy Years of Farm Machinery Part One: Seedtime by Brian Bell. Hardback, approx 176 pages inc. 276 illustrations. ISBN 978-1-906853-18-1. IN STOCK at Old Pond at £19.95.
CONTENTS
1 The development of the farm tractor from the Fordson Model F to the JCB Fastrac.
2 Trailed and mounted conventional and reversible ploughs, chisel ploughs, push-pull ploughs and square ploughs.
3 Cultivators, disc harrows, chain harrows, power harrows, rotary cultivators, subsoilers, combination cultivators, steerage hoes and weeders.
4 Grain drills, cultivator drills and direct drills.
5 Root drills and precision seeders.
6 Potato planters and vegetable planters.
7 Field heap manure spreaders, trailer spreaders, side-spreaders and slurry spreaders.
8 Manure loaders, front-end loaders and rear loaders.
9 Full-width fertiliser distributors, spinner broadcasters and pneumatic spreaders.
10 Farm crop sprayers, air-blast sprayers, controlled droplet sprayers, band sprayers and weed wipers.
Index
As Brian Bell writes in his Foreword:
'A late 1940s farming report suggested that the past decade could well have seen the coming of a second agricultural revolution. This prediction proved to be accurate with much of the credit going to Henry Ford, Harry Ferguson, David Brown and other pioneers. Another report recorded the fact that there were thirteen horses for every tractor working on British farms in 1939 - but within ten years horses outnumbered tractors by a ratio of only two to one.
'This book traces the development of tractors, tillage equipment, drills, fertiliser distributors, manure spreaders and crop sprayers from the days when Fordson Model N tractors were used to pull trailed ploughs, cup-feed drills and field-heap manure spreaders. The progression from those early farm machines to the latest computerised tractor management systems with satellite navigation operated from the comfort of an air-conditioned cab has happened in little more than a single lifetime. Farming folk, many of whom have only recently achieved the status of senior citizen, will remember sitting on a tractor seat with a corn sack over their knees to keep out the cold, walking behind a cup-feed drill or chopping out sugar beet and turnips with a hand hoe.'
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