when big tractors get stuck

Our biggest stuff-ups often occur on our last day in town. True to the trend we managed to get our granddaddy tractor stuck in a drain while cutting our second last field in Faulkton SD.

When a combine gets bogged, the grain cart, with four-wheel-drive and a set of eight, six-foot tall tyres will usually get you out of trouble, however, this particular field proved too great an opponent.

Scuba was positioning the grain cart so that he could pull Andrew’s combine out of the mud, however, he clipped the edge of the field as he was turning around and was sucked into the drain.

At first the situation was quite tense because it provided a significant delay so close to finishing the job and we were unsupervised when it happened. Greg was clearly unimpressed when he arrived at the field. He’d got the message over the radio as he and Cheryl were leaving town for lunch in Aberdeen.

At first, I was sneaking my camera out whenever Greg wasn’t looking and stuffing it back in my pocket to lend a hand where I could. However, as the tractor became more and more bogged, and we became more and more muddy, grins started to appear on faces as the situation became increasingly ridiculous.

First we tried reversing the cart out the way it came, hitching a second four-wheel-drive tractor to the trailer. This failing, we tried pulling it out through the ditch and onto the road. After snapping a couple of chains, we unhitched the trailer from the tractor and finally managed to pull the tractor up onto the road leaving the trailer in the ditch. It took both four-wheel-drive tractors in a Y-formation to finally pull the trailer out.

Greg has a thing about cleanliness. I guess spending six months of the year in a plume of dust does something to you. One of the first rules he lay down during his pre-season pep-talk was in regard to the cleanliness of the machinery, inside and out. Whenever you see him in the video, he is well clear of the mud; when he’s giving directions, he’s on the road, when he’s in the field, he’s up on the tractor. You’ll also notice a shot of me on my arse in the mud. I went to step backwards and my feet didn’t move. Greg got quite a kick out of this. The dirtiest he got that morning was when he took a couple of steps into the ditch to grab my camera so that he could get a shot of me in the mud.