Tractor Tuesday SNAP

Actually almost a triple SNAP.

CTJ posted a JCB today and as an extra a red tractor. I have done the same. If our Tractor Tuesday President had posted one of her boys out doing some of the maize silaging she wrote about, I would have had a full house.

Set out for the dog walk passing a contractor team of harvester and three tractor/loaders parked up next to a maize field and seemingly having a long talk, unusual for contractors who always seem to be whizzing around under the motto "Time is Money".

So was pretty sure I would catch them hard at work when I drove home. Went to the grass/maize drying unit to pay for the grass cobs/pellets Angie had picked up last week - €92 for 400kg or as they would say here, €23 for a double "Zentner" which those in the UK with a long memory will recognise as originating from the medieval word centum from which "cwt" was derived which was until the wretched EU came along the "(imperial) hundredweight" or 112lbs or 50.802345 kg. USA had for some unbelievable reason gone for a hundredweight with 100lbs or 45.359237 kg. Why they wanted to make things easy will probably remain a secret but should make forthcoming trade negotiations between the USA and England interesting.

By the way go in to a German shop and ask for a "Pound" (Pfund) of nails, coffee, butter or flour and you will get 500g. Word still very widely used here.

Parked up at the works were two of their JCB tractors. I suspect the drivers were having a break rather than the machines had broken down and Lord Bamford had stopped exporting spare parts.

Could be there is little work right now, everyone seemed to have been mowing and silaging grass last week and now the starting gun is being prepared for maize. But as I was to find out after the walk in nearby Sontheim, it seems the maize still isn't ripe enough for silage or pellets. The silaging contractor team had not harvested the maize field I had seen them at earlier but had just finished a small field a kilometre away from which I counted three trailer loads. Extra photo is one of the Case tractors heading past the drying unit on its way to Westerheim to be silaged. The Krone harvester was then clearly put in to "no more work mode" by removal of the front unit and on the second extra photo spotted heading home to Hawangen where the contractor is based.

Spent the walk again thinking about the British Isles as a Ryanair plane came in to land at Memmingen and we walked past a wood joinery business which specialised in wood framed houses and on renovation of old houses. I need to find out more, but seems the owner who lives next door has more or less got out of the business and has gone over to a simple "Good Life" with every inch of the fields and paths around the house full of sheep, cows, chickens and loads more. In a recent issue of the parish news, he declared people who were organising their own house build, could hire out his buildings and joinery machines to do the work. The website probably isn't up to date as it seems to show everything as it was a few years ago.

Why can language be such a barrier? What I saw today was an ideal basis for a family business. As the Brits say: C'est la vie.