Suffering April showers, because we want flowers in May

Agricultural journalist, smallholder and editor of Ford & Fordson Tractors Magazine Jane Brooks, joins us for her regular look at the world.

- Jane Brooks

A couple of years ago I played a small part in a documentary about Harry Ferguson and Henry Ford that included my five minutes of fame, well more like a minute and a half of airtime, chatting to Patrick Kielty about Harry Ferguson, in the garden of Ferguson's former family home just outside of Stow on the Wold.

Ferguson was an inventor and innovator, whose aim through his designs was to reduce poverty and hunger through the mechanisation of farming, in fact his innovative three point linkage is still the main way of coupling an implement to a tractor.

In today's world innovation is often the key to success, but it's not always the big new ideas that have the greatest success, small scale farmers, or smallholders, call us what you may, can also come up with some brilliant and innovative designs.

Take our old egg collecting unit, which was a converted lorry body built by my brother. First a frame using second hand timber was built to hold eight roll away nest boxes. An offcut of egg conveyor belt on a loop was installed behind to catch the eggs. This was in turn connected to a device operated by an old tractor steering wheel which would rotate the conveyor out of a lockable rodent proof flap at the end of the container onto a packing table where we could stand and put the eggs into trays.

Pop holes were made in the side of the container, which would open and peg up out of the way to let the hens out in the daytime, with them, much to my surprise happily making their way back inside at dusk.

It was great, until we realised that it actually took as much time, if not more, to collect the eggs using the wheel and belt as it did to just nip in the container and get them ourselves.