TRACTORS!
(ages ago in November) I successfully passed my basic tractor skills ticket. Here's a bit of detail about that event.
In my first work experience at placement at an estate not too far away in 2022, I got to use the tractor. It was a big beast of a thing and had many dials, pedals, levers and hydraulic connections. I could drive it and once the attachments had been connected for me, I could use them. However, at that point I couldn’t tell you the difference between a PTO (power take-off) attachment and a three point attachment to a trailer hitch. I was a total newb, so it’s not surprising. The work experience, which I thought was going to be mainly forestry, I now understand to be “estate management”. At the time I started I’d only left my desk job a few weeks earlier and everything was new. However, I had to start somewhere…
First Work Experience
On my first day at the estate back on the 11th October 2022 I got to use the forwarder (log grabby thing) to feed a fire that I’d been asked to start using nothing other the red diesel, newspaper and twigs. It was thrilling. By the time the fire was going the heat was intense. Just as intense as the feeling that I didn’t have a clue about this new world I’d entered. Frankly, I felt a bit useless at that work placement and I wish I could have been more useful. However, starting a new career does involve feeling useless because frankly, for a while you are useless. I’m getting off point.
In estate management and forestry world a tractor is an essential bit of kit. You use it for everything. Pulling trailers of biomass, extracting timber from felling sites, processing logs with fancy pants attachments, cutting grass, knocking in fence posts, getting from A > B when someone else is using the pickup, and at that work placement, loading up the sawmill with logs.
However, the tractor was a mystery to me. They drive differently in that you don’t need to use the throttle to prevent stalling, just being in gear and taking your foot off the clutch is enough to drive it. They have independent brakes that can allow for one side to brake whilst the other side doesn’t (sharp turns) but most of all they have about ten billion gears, a hand throttle and a foot operated diff lock for when you’re losing traction in whatever sticky situation you find yourself in. I could work it when I was there, but I wasn’t an operator as such. I was more like a remotely operated lump of meat. I wanted to learn more and become a decent tractor operator, but the universe didn’t unfold that way and I didn’t get the chance. When I’ve been working in the woodland over this last year it’s about once an hour I think to myself just how much I’d love to have a tractor as they are awesome and pretty much solve every problem you can have.
Don’t be useless Jamie.
More recently we hired in a tractor operator to solve a problem that I couldn’t - moving a massive oak log. I can’t see the limits of how useful a tractor would in the woodland. It’d make easy work of installing proper rides, creating a parking / loading area not to mention making easy work of moving heavy stuff, processing firewood, winching out hangers and a million other things. However, tractors are expensive and I don’t have the spare dollars to buy one.
Yet.
But one day I might and when that day comes I wanted to be able to use one with some degree of confidence. I also want to never find myself in the situation I was in at my first work placement of being useless on a tractor. I don’t mind being “not very good”, but never again do I want to be “useless”. So when the chance came up to sit my basic tractor skills ticket at treeschool I leapt at the chance.
Teeny tractor.
Behold the little kubota L5030.
Compared to the machine I used at the estate management gig, this kubota was teeny tiny. However, the smaller machine had some benefits as it was notably less complicated.
The course was pretty straight forward and followed the standard NPTC format. The legals, the legislation the pre-start checks and of course safe operations of the tractor and the various attachments. This is the only photo I managed to get of the tractor because driving a tractor and taking photos isn’t recommended if you want to pass the assessment. The only thing about the course that sucked was the weather. It was hammering down with rain and I got very wet.
I was to be assessed on three main elements of tractor usage: one – attaching a hydraulic trailer and driving the tractor, two – reversing and tipping the trailer and three – using a PTO machine linked using a three point attachment.
Sadly I didn’t get many pictures of the training days or the assessment. It was raining very heavily everyday which made for awful photos and asking other people to take photos of me doing stuff seemed excessively narcissistic. So you get words, random internet photos and some extra effort from me to bring it all to life.
Attaching a Hydraulic Trailer
Also called a “tipper trailer”. This was pretty similar to attaching (aka hitching) the chipper to the truck at treecompany. Once the trailer was attached and connected to the hydraulics I then had to drive the tractor over to the the obstacle course. I was honestly as excited a child on Christmas day by this point.
The exam guidance only stated that I had to drive around the obstacle course forwards and then reverse into a designated tipping bay. But I let slip to the examiner that I’d never reversed anything whilst towing until a few days before hand. Thanks to my big mouth, I had to drive the tractor and trailer both forwards and backwards around the obstacle course before finally reversing into tipping bay and “tipping off” (dumping everything). Suffice to say I managed all of the reversing. It wasn’t pretty but I managed it. My future has a lot of reversing with trailed things in it.
Power take off (PTO) attachments
Finally in the assessment, I had to reverse into a PTO tool (in this case a seed spreader) connect it to the PTO shaft and power it on. It wasn’t very exciting, and in fact, this whole “writing about the tractor assessment” is actually a little boring. This is probably why this post sat in my drafts for over a month. The saving grace here is the power and flexibility that a vehicle with PTO has to offer in the setting of a woodland. I am nearly always around tractors when in a commercial woodland setting. Whilst I don’t have a tractor, or access to one in Treedom Woods, I would LOVE to have one. It’d make nearly everything a million times easier and the main reason is the PTO shaft.
The PTO shaft is like a secondary transmission (a transmission is the thing in cars connects the output of the engine into a spinning shaft which ultimately makes the car a thing that moves) that you can connect any a mind-blowing amount of tools to and when combined with the plug and play hydraulics on a tractor you’re essentially limited only by your imagination and risk tolerance in terms of what you can use a tractor for. In a woodland setting you’re mainly talking about log splitters, chippers, and bracken management.
I am now a bit more useful
Whilst it is not likely I will own a tractor, I am now commercially insurable to run a tractor. I cannot be insured for lifting stuff using the front-loaders until I do the second part of the ticket (these tickets are a basically a pyramid scheme) but that’s ok with me. The main reason I wanted to get the basic tractor skills ticket is that I can be useful. If I had been able to use the tractor more confidently at my first work experience placement, I may have still been there. Even if I wasn’t, I certainly would have been more useful whilst I was there.
I’m nearly always around tractors when I’m out in commercial woodland. In the above picture I’d just climbed up and smashed the top out of this ash tree in a local oak plantation. See the tractor in the background? The tractor at the work experience place went everywhere on the job.
The next time I’m in a situation where I’m on a job and by some chance someone is needed to drive a tractor – now I can. That makes me more useful and if there is one thing you need to know about me is that I LOVE being useful and I HATE being useless.
Thanks for reading, especially for something as dry as a basic tractor skills ticket.
As always, I appreciate your attention.
Cheers,
Jamie.