Food for Thought

Ford has just sent us a picture of the new Ford Ranger pick-up. Looks very smart, with a 200hp engine option and some sophisticated-sounding features like adaptive load control, trailer sway control and voice control. Also a rear-view camera system

Of course, none of these technologies is exactly new. They existed decades ago but in a slightly different form.

* Adaptive load control: if you put too much stuff on the truck, you, er, take some off again.
* Trailer sway control: if the trailer starts to weave from side to side, you slow down. Or ease back on the drink.
* Rear view camera system. Turn head through 180deg. If on the move don't forget to turn head back again.
* Voice control: if the truck won't start you shout "Start you bastard, start!"

When you are busy ploughing the last thing you expect is for the the ground to suddenly collapse beneath you spinning you through 360 degrees and across two fields.

But that is exactly what happened to James Fletcher, who works for Chester-based contractor Mike Harley, as these pictures on FWiSpace show.

Quite extraordinary.

The World Ag Expo opened today under a blanket of dense fog.

The expo ground is in the heart of California's San Joaquin Valley, and the surrounding mountains trap so much moisture that some days during winter the fog's so thick that it’s impossible to drive anywhere – something that would clearly be a disaster to this machinery-loving town.

It was quite sinister to wander around the showground and see enormous tractors loom out of the fog less than a few feet in front of you. And this seemed to happen every few steps.

As one farmer said to me, it may billed as a farming expo, but in reality it’s an enormous showcase of machinery stretching from one side of the 60 acre ground to the other.

While I recognised most of the names and machines on show, there were quite a few things that I had never seen before because they’re not used in the UK.

Cotton strippers, grape pickers, almond harvesters and tomato pickers were lined up, looking as alien as a row of Transformers.

It looks like today could be the big day at LAMMA. I’ve heard several people say that they’ve come today because the weather forecast looks better than for tomorrow. It’s certainly looking good at the moment – no rain!

Let’s just hope if the weather does turn, there’s no repeat of last year when high winds blew a steel-framed marquee across the showground and forced the show to close a couple of hours early.

What’s the first thing you notice when you get to the LAMMA show?

Well, it might be the huge number of vehicles in the car park or the vast array of machinery and equipment on offer from both small and large manufacturers.

But what I noticed first was the number of young faces walking around. Contrary to conventional wisdom it looks as if there are actually a lot of young people in agriculture.

LAMMA is obviously an event that appeals to the young and old(er) alike. And not just people from the UK. Talking to people I’ve already heard of people flying in from Germany and Israel for the event.

Very impressive...

This was the first day Germany's farming public got to see what Agritechnica had to offer. Various moustachioed Bavarians have begun poring over the gleaming kit while ruthlessly-efficient Teutonic businessmen nod unsmilingly and tap into Blackberries.

Here in the press room, stuffed to the gills with bratwurst, sauerkraut and kartoffel-something, there's a strange quiet throughout the exhibition complex.

It's not too often I step outside the realms of agricultural business. As a business journalist, I'm not comfortable with anything that doesn't have a pound sign next to it, or, preferably, a graph.

So its a real change of pace to report from Germany's gargantuan Agritechnica 2007 event.

Opinion is divided on whether this is the world's biggest - or merely Europe's biggest - agricultural machinery show. Some reckon the USA's Farm Progress Show is even bigger, but Agritechnica can certainly claim to be the biggest show indoors.

You don't have to be a Belgian detective with a funny moustache* to guess who's been buying most of the new machinery in the last four or five years. Yes, it's contractors and bigger farmers, plus those acquisitive types who who have taken on the farm next door.

A favourite on the FWi website is the Wrecker's Yard section - a place where disasters with farm machinery are celebrated in style.

There have been some great ones over the past couple of years - we've seen a combine harvester on its end rather than on its wheels and a tractor submerged in a pond.

But this new one of a mangled Massey Ferguson in Canada probably beats them all. Apparently the hydraulics on the loader failed which meant the bucket dug into the ground and the tractor was projected up into the air as if it was playing leapfrog.

Amazing.

This blog is dedicated to everyone who battled the mud, the ruts and the rain in Car Park Two at the Royal Show on the evening of Monday 2 July. Other commentators will wrangle and dispute the future of the Royal Show itself. Farmers Weekly’s own columnist David Richardson made an admirable start this morning with his blog (David’s Digest, Tragic Royal Washed Away).

It may seem a strange thing to say, but vast arrays of machinery at agricultural shows are becoming rarer and rarer.

Not so at the Royal Highland Show where all the major manufacturers were out in force. The RHS is after all very much a farmers show - no wonder Agco, JD and the rest reckon it's worth being there.

We've just had a nice estate off the Saab press fleet. Nothing unusual about that, except that this is the Biopower 9-5 estate which runs on E85, a mixture of 85% bioethanol and 15% petrol.

How did we get on with it? There's good and bad news to report.

Farmers Weekly's parent company, Reed Business Information, has challenged all the magazines in the building to come up with a video related to the sector we work in.

FW's - very funny - entry shows machinery editor Nick Fone getting stuck in some mud on one of his machinery tests. Why not take a look and add your comment on YouTube.

And our rivals - including the people on Travel Weekly magazine, for example - have videoed themselves singing the Wham classic Club Tropicana....

At last, confirmation that at a diversified farming industry generates a thriving economy - in France at least. It comes from the SIMA Show, Paris, which ends today, out of the mouth of Jean-Paul Papillon of machinery exporters' association SYGMA.
It is France's highly diversified farming structure, spanning large-scale farms in the Paris Basin to the small hill farms of the Massif Central that has encouraged French machinery manufacturers to produce diversified farm equipment, he told me. And that wide range is paying off in terms of rapidly rising export sales.

Time: Yesterday lunchtime.
Location: SIMA show ground, Paris.
Situation: Desperate.

It was no good - I needed sustenance and I needed it quickly. Tired of tramping the 22ha (54 acres) of showground and shouldering my way through the tens of thousands of visitors thronging the machinery and livestock lines, I needed reviving and soon. I found the answer in that classic French dish tartiflette.

Ian Ashbridge's comments about being wined and dined by AGCO provided a sneaky insight into an area that we journalists don't often comment publicly on.
As someone who has pounded the machinery beat ever since the Ford 5000 was a youngster and attended more off-roader launches than you can shake a leather-covered gearstick at, I'm always struck by the difference in wallet power between the ag machinery firms and the car ones.

Cheers to Jeremy Turney the new Farmers Weekly Machinery Dealer of the Year. Mr Turney triumphed in the competition run by FW and Promosalons UK the company that promotes the SIMA Show being staged in Paris this week. Jeremy of Turney-Agriforce is a Case IH dealer, based in Bicester, Oxfordshire. He was nominated for the award by Andrew Mahon, farms manager at Charlton Farms, Banbury. According to Andrew, Jeremy shows superb commitment to supplying the best dealer services that he can both in terms of parts supply and maintenance.

Ian Ashbridge writes from France's mammoth SIMA show:

In keeping with the vastness of the Paris SIMA event, global machinery giant AGCO chose the occasion to cosy up to Europe's farming journalists in the style that only a global presence - and a strengthened Titanium cheque-book - can do.

Filling journalists with expensive food and wine is a press strategy as old as the hills, but must still be an effective one. Straight from the show, we were whisked away in a convoy of immaculate white coaches to Le Pre Catalan, an exclusive hotel in the leafy Bois de Boulogne park where Paris's elite live in shaded seclusion and - it's rumoured - anything goes.

When the French do farm shows, they do them really well.

Take for example SIMA which opened yesterday and runs until Thursday 8 March at France's national exhibition centre at Villepinte, north of Paris.

The numbers are staggering: It covers 22ha (54 acres) and attracts nearly 200,000 visitors and more than 1300 exhibitors from 39 countries.

Pure entertainment! As a Top Gear fan, Sunday nights are always something to look forward to.

But yesterday evening's show was a real treat...if you're into farming that is.

Watching Clarkson, Hammond and May make a total hash of switching on, let alone manoeuvring, their three tractors in the Top Gear car park, and later ploughing - if you can call it that - a 25-acre field on NFU president Peter Kendall's farm, brought home just how easy the UK's skilled tractor drivers make it look.

Having learned to plough some years ago myself, I'd like to think I'd have made a better job than the BBC trio, but I reckon I'd be a bit out of practice, though I doubt if I'd have resorted to dynamite as the guys eventually did.

"How fast do you plough? - Our ignorance about farming was a little embarrassing," Clarkson noted.

"How hard can it be to make petrol from Crops?" he asked.

Well judging by their attempt, a lot harder than they thought.

With Hammond rigged up to a plough which Clarkson described as "Battlestar Galactica", the three presenters went on what an old golfer at my club describes as, "manoeuvres".

Hammond quickly broke a shear bolt on his "Star Ship Enterplough", Clarkson took out a telegraph pole, and May, taking on drilling duties, dumped the entire bag of rapeseed upon setting off on his first bout. "You've done the whole bloody lot - twenty-five acres into 25 inches," Clarkson opined.

Meanwhile Hammond took a detour to buy lunch, upsetting the burghers of Ashwell as he blocked the main street with his Quadtrac before "filling up" at the local garage. £1,127 for diesel? That certainly dwarfs my mileage claims!

Back in the studio May, with a certain degree of predictability, joked: "I had to go back and do it through the night [re-drill the crop] until my seed was planted evenly into every furrow I could find."

Well it was all in the name of entertainment, and although the "set-ups" were somewhat obvious, particularly if you know anything about agriculture, it's good to see farming make it to prime-time viewing.

One small problem: Doesn't oilseed rape get converted into biodiesel? Mmmm could be a problem if they're expecting petrol from the field next summer. Sorry to spoil the party chaps...