Will’s World: A farming day when nothing goes wrong? If only
© Richard Stanton “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same” – so wrote Rudyard Kipling, in his seminal 1895 poem If.
I’ve always particularly liked that line and think about it often.
Kipling wrote it for his young son John, and was encouraging him to maintain a balanced perspective on life by being neither unduly elated by success nor too demoralised by failure.
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About the author
I wonder, as farmers, how good we are at this. I suspect we’re far better at being demoralised by failure than we are at being elated by success.
We should probably celebrate our wins more, both collectively as an industry and on a personal level – even if they’re just everyday things.
Disc pain
Anyway, I’ve just had a week of both triumphs and minor disasters, and I’m still recovering emotionally and physically.
It started with fertilising.
I was merrily spreading away on the spring barley, thinking that after a bit of recent rain it would finally get going, when I heard a loud noise.
A bearing had gone on one spreading disc, causing the whole thing to wobble up and down as it spun.
Consequently, the vanes had ripped off a big piece of the aluminium surround, which had got all tangled up with them.
Marvellous. What was even better was that it was nearly full, and the only way to change the bearing is from the inside.
An hour of shovelling, sweating and swearing later, I could finally get at the thing.
The next day I was spreading muck on fields that were going into maize. It started well, before once again an unexpected noise shattered my reverie.
The new telehandler was rapidly leaking transmission oil, and a shrill alarm was going off to inform me of this.
Seal of disapproval
I messed about with it for most of the day, adding oil after every load so we could keep going (the spreader was on hire and God forbid we’d have to pay for an extra day), and getting ever more frustrated with it and with life in general.
The dealer came out the next morning, and it turns out a jobsworth in the factory hadn’t tightened some fittings properly and it had blown a couple of seals.
Far from the end of the world, but highly irritating nevertheless, given the cost of the machine, and if I could get hold of the Italian factory worker responsible, I’d cheerfully put pineapple on his pizza.
Then, at the end of a long day of subsoiling, I was having an issue with the hydraulic top link.
I climbed on the back to have a look at it, slipped straight off and simultaneously slammed both my forearm and shin into the unforgiving steel.
Blast it all, I mildly exclaimed.
Wipe your feet
By this point I was hungry for a triumph, and it came in the form of one of my rare bright ideas.
One of the subsoiler feet kept falling off when I picked up on the headlands and, try as I might, I couldn’t get it to stay on.
Well, if you’re reading this, Practical Farm Ideas Magazine, this is worth a front page and 2,000-word feature, because eventually I solved the problem with a used disposable hand wipe.
Simply wrapped it around the point, tapped the foot over it, and it stayed on for the rest of the day – I can’t adequately describe the pleasure I took from this after the week I’d had.
And then, that evening, our beloved Wrexham FC got promoted for the third season in a row.
Up the unduly triumphant championship Reds.