DRILLING - A CURE FOR NAIL BITERS

By Alan Garratt

It's the early 1960's and springtime meant farmers preparing their seed-beds. I never did a great deal ploughing as a boy, not because I wasn’t any good at it - It was more a job for a man and normally done by the farmer, Mr Burgess, or his full timer. Following with the discs, or the harrows, or the roller, was OK for a teenager and I spent many a happy day on the old EN27 Fordson harrowing. I loved it. Back and forward - up and down - round and round. Mr Burgess was probably happy to have me do this, as it inevitably led to the less pleasurable drilling. Drilling was serious stuff. You could disc over bad discing and harrow over bad harrowing but drilling had to be done properly… first time otherwise the profitability of the crop was compromised. One blocked drill head and that meant 200 yards x 6 inches without a crop.

The drill was a combination drill. This meant that the seed was in a crossways hopper and a parallel hopper held the fertilizer - basically nitrogen pellets. Each hopper had two half width hinged covers to keep everything dry. The large steel land wheels of the drill turned two sets of gears – one below each hopper, these were calibrated with some gubbin’s to mix the correct quantity of seed with the correct amount of fertilizer. This mixture was riddled down a series of flexible tubes and between to two discs that formed a forward facing vee shape. The discs were pressed into the soil so that the seed mixture fell into a nice little slot. Opposing fingers followed to close the slot and bury the seed mixture. Each slot was about six inches apart and the whole drill was about ten foot wide.

There were two jobs. Job one was to drive the tractor, usually the David Brown Cropmaster, in a straight beat and in-line with the previous beat; you mustn’t have a gap as that meant no crop. At each headland a rope from the drill to the tractor needed pulling to stop the gears driving the gubbin’s and so prevent wasted seeding whilst turning.

The next job was to man the drill. A foot board ran across the back of the drill; the drill man stood on this plank and was able to move from left to right lifting the covers to check the levels. Sometimes the seed to fertilizer mix meant that they ran out at different times. The next job for the drill man was to squat on his haunches, holding a handrail that ran across the back. He would check that the seed mixture was dropping into the slot in the ground. A blocked chute needed clearing quickly, otherwise it was necessary to stop the tractor to clear it. Clearing on-the-move was done with a prodder. A prodder was usually a thin metal rod bent into a shape evolved by experience. It needed to be ok for smacking as well as prodding; importantly, you dropped it at your peril - that enforced a tractor stop. The flexible tubes were made of a combination of corrugated rubber tubing and tin joiners. A bit like old fashioned knights armour, with rubber instead of chain-mail. Remember all this had to happen with the drill moving over the bumpy land on un-sprung steel wheels. Add to that a freezing wind, rattelin’ gubbin’s and you can imagine how uncomfortable this job was. It went on hour after hour. The only respite was the five minutes it took to re-load seed and nitrogen. Gloves were a no no. Impossible to hold-on wearing gloves whilst riddling the seeds and nitrogen at the same time. Hour after hour you needed to keep your concentration or the results of your in-attention would become apparent a few weeks later when the green shoots appeared, or in this case didn’t. In fact all these aspects of the job paled in comparison with checking the nitrogen hopper. Nitrogen pellets were very susceptible to damp and a little dampness caused the pellets to crust. You opened the hopper and it looked full but you couldn’t trust it. You needed to comb your fingers through it and break it up.

So we have freezing cold hands, hanging on to a cold steel bar to stop you from slipping off a foot board in your muddy wellies. Can it get worse; Oh yes. It could for me. In his wisdom God decided that I would be a nail biter. I was a happy lad without a care in the world. Well fed and well loved - no need to nibble the quick’s, but I did. My fingertips would sometime be raw. Two things don’t go well together; nitrogen and raw flesh.

A days drilling was more a job for a man than a boy. I don’t know how much a man would earn a day but in the early 1960's I got a shilling (about 10¢ents).