Andy Scott, Tractorman

I have spent my life on farms and my family history is the same, all being born and brought up on different farms. I am a time served agricultural engineer, serving my time between 1969 – 1974. Afterwards I did a brief stint driving diggers for a contractor but soon went back onto farms.

Over the past few weeks I have been sowing Spring Wheat, Rye and Fava Beans. The heritage wheats are for Scotland the Bread and niche markets and we are growing the beans for Hodmedod’s. We bought a new Vaderstad grain drill last year which had it’s first outing on the 25^th March last year, this year I started sowing on the 24^th March so almost exactly a year later we started again.

It’s all finished now and I sowed the last field of barley in on Friday which will be a feed crop for pigs and sheep and is all organic. Next on the job list is to sow grass seed for herbal leys that’s meant to be good for cattle, it includes many different herbs which is going in to make it more palatable for the animals. This can stretch out over the next 2 – 3 weeks as we wait for the mob grazing cattle to move on. We can sow about 25 hectares a day easily without long hours and in good conditions.

I enjoy my job and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. I like being outside in the fresh air, meeting different people and taking pride in my work. When you see crop coming through the different stages to harvest and understand that it was you that started that off, it’s a good feeling.

Aside from sowing I have also been helping patching drains with Dave, mole ploughing water pipes for the new field structure with water troughs and pop ups for the mob grazing. We feed a reel of pipe into a machine that we had adapted from an old subsoiler that buries the pipe about 15-18 inches deep and is quite an environmentally friendly way of doing it.

The Fife Show is on the 21^st May this year and I will be receiving my long service medal for 30 years of farming. I’m quite happy about it and it will be a proper family affair as my brother in law gets his as well on the same day, plus our friend that works at Pusk Farm will be receiving his 45 year medal so we’ll definitely be having a few beverages had that day and just hoping for some nice weather!