A tractor that’s hard to Afford

Courier Countryside column for 13 December

A tractor that’s hard to Afford

We’ve had our tractor stolen.  One day it was in the Community Orchard waiting to move the last of the season’s apple crop, the next day it wasn’t. It’s strange.  You do a double-take and wonder if, perhaps, you’d forgotten that you’d put it somewhere else.  But my memory isn’t that bad. Then you think another committee member must have shifted it.  But only the chairman has a key and one phone call quickly established he hadn’t touched it.  So you have to conclude it’s gone.

The police officer who came to my house to take the details wasn’t particularly surprised.  Old ones like that are very desirable, he told me. They usually get shipped out to Eastern Europe.  They’re cheap to run, easy to maintain and extremely simple to pinch.

The insurance loss adjuster said exactly the same thing. They fill a container with them and ship them out. Makes economic sense, especially if they didn’t pay anything for the item in the first place!

None of which is of much comfort.  Though the insurance man did agree to pay out the full sum.  Trouble is replacing it for that amount will prove extremely difficult as we got rather a good deal when we bought it.  And we’re certainly not going to get back the money we’ve spent on it.  Like replacing the clutch. Or overhauling the brakes.  Or buying it a brand new £100 battery the week before it went.  Which is doubly galling because the thieves wouldn’t have been able to start it if we hadn’t just renewed it.

This year we had a bumper harvest and this old – 1966 – Ford 4000 proved essential to lift the great cubie bags of apples off the ground and onto the extraordinary assortment of car trailers we were using.  So although I’d never used a front loader (the big hydraulic arms that reach out over the front of the tractor, usually with a bucket or spikes on the end) I quickly discovered we couldn’t do without one.  Trouble is now we may have to.  It looks as if we can replace the tractor itself for the money we have, but getting a front loader as well looks out of our price range.

So if you come across an ancient battered blue tractor with freshly painted front arms and roll bar, registration JPN 46D, please let the police know.