9th May

There has been a job that has been in the back of my mind for a few months now, and it was needing looked at.

I have been looking at buying a camera guided weeding machine for the fields, for a few years.

Some of you might remember about a machine called a robo crop, this was camera guided, but couldn’t do all the crops and came in at sixty thousand pounds, and that was about five years ago, so god knows what that price would be now.

But at the tail end of last year I was searching again, and came across another machine that done all crops, and was a third of the price.

So After a phone call to the company down south about the machine, and a few questions asked, I thought great, but thinking I was on for a 400-mile drive down south to see one.

But very lucky for me, there was an area rep only in Perth 9 miles away, and a local farmer 15 miles away that had two of the machines, and had been working them for a couple of years, bonus.

So the job that has been pestering me, was to get the power to the machine, from my tractor and mount the on-board computer screen that works the whole thing.

The problem I have compared with everyone else, is that I have a very basic but great T reg John Deere, there were no camera guided machines in those days, so no power points, and no rubber plugs that can be removed, for putting cables in from the front, I have two at the rear which are no good for the new front mounted machine.

So a couple of holes were needed to be drilled, one at the side of the bonnet, where I connected a waterproof power point, taking the power feed straight from the battery with an in-line fuse for safety, I can now plug in and this goes straight to the control box on the machine.

Next there is a cable comes from the machine to the computer screen in the cab.

So I had to bore a hole in the floor, here I can feed the cable up to the screen, and I have a rubber plug where I can plug the whole when it’s not needed.

Also my tractor isn’t equipped with points to fix a computer screen.

So I had to bolt and weld up a small frame, which I bolted just under the roof and screwed the screen onto that.

Now it’s all working and ready to go.

I will need to put in different programs for each crop as I go.

But hopefully this will save us from bed weeding the field, a long job that lasts all summer.

The broad beans that we planted last week should be up soon, I will video the machine working and put it on Facebook, and let you all know how it’s going. Fingers crossed