It could have turned out very differently. It’s possible that I might be kitted out in a clean pair of John Deere overalls on a Sunday like the other Deere gurus.
I have to take you back to the halcyon days of 1978 when the sun was always shining and grain was a golden commodity. I was a young buck of 18 years of age and with a very middling Leaving Cert in my back pocket. But I couldn’t have cared less – I’d get into some agricultural college because that was my career plan, even though I wouldn’t have recognised it as such.
My mother dutifully drove me down to Mellows College in Athenry for an interview but they weren’t too keen to take me.
Gurteen College was a complete no-no. My father had employed a young ex-Gurteen student as a trainee manager who had introduced pigs to the farm, much to my father’s annoyance. They were a disaster and there was a chance I might do the same. So Gurteen was out.
But I’ve digressed from the story I set out to tell you.
A year earlier, in 1977, my father had bought an Ursus 1201, a big pig of a tractor with 120 snorting horses up front and a greenhouse for a cab. Nevertheless, it (it didn’t qualify as a she) was an absolute beast to plough and power the Taarup harvester. But my older brother and I weren’t too enamoured with the Eastern Bloc addition to the fleet. Frankly, it was an embarrassment.
You see, we thought there was a stigma attached to owning an Ursus; even its posher first cousin, the Zetor, would have been an improvement. Tillage men in the parish like the Rickards or Conlons didn’t have to endure an Ursus, so why should we?
As a matter of fact, anything would have been better than an Ursus back then. After all, there were three huge MF 1135s in the locality, and a mega Ford 8600.
And Robert Smith, a complete MF nut with red diesel pumping through his veins, had an articulated MF 1200, the stuff of dreams. But we were stuck with the wretched Ursus.
However, there was hope on the horizon. Near neighbour Jimmy Kearney owned one of the few John Deeres around, a massive 4230 in two-wheel-drive but that wasn’t a problem – most tillage men had two-wheel-drives back then. You’d have to go to Navan and Tom Farrell to find a County.
But Jimmy with the big John Deere was a tillage contractor and was up there with Led Zeppelin in our teenage eyes. One of my earliest childhood memories is of his two BM Volvo combines cutting wheat in front of our home.
But times had moved on and Jimmy Kearney was having a machinery clearance auction. We hinted to dad (who was the auctioneer) that the big John Deere would be a great buy. Jimmy drove it in his slippers, we said. Would he think about buying it?
But Dad didn’t see it our way. The Ursus was only a year old and it would be financial madness to swap it for the big Deere.
I often think how different it might have been if he had bought that Deere.
I’d say if John Deere made it, I’d have had it. If Deere even made a bicycle I’d own one (Fendt did and I do). Clearly I was so psychologically scarred from having the cheapest tractor on the market that I had to go to the other extreme and buy the dearest and best that there was, a Fendt.
But Fendt don’t build tractors like they used to. Do John Deere?
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