Field on Fieldays – Day three

Day Two dawned a little better than Day One at the Mystery Creek National Fieldays, but there was a quiet undercurrent of concern among many of the exhibitors.

The first day had seen a good crowd, though not as good as some of the best years, said some of the big machinery men. Food stall holders seemed to happy with the day’s take, but the principal exhibitors – those selling the heavy equipment – were a little worried that the first day had produced too many tyre-kickers and not enough serious buyers.

Yet the stories varied. Major vendors of outdoor, hunting and work clothing were largely happy with the day’s take, several saying they had moved double or better what they had expected.

The main breakfast tent had queues of hungry people, and staff were frantically working to keep the food trays loaded. Coffee vendors were hard-pushed to cope with demand, and streets seemed well crowded with visitors.

But the record number of traditional exhibitors – those with the machinery used in the business of cropping and the big tractors for general farm work – had concerns that farmers were still somewhat cautious.

“Yeah, they’re interested, and they’re willing to buy some of the smaller stuff, like pig-tail standards,” said one exhibitor. “But they don’t yet seem keen to pull out the cheque-book and sign up for the big items – the tractors and that sort of stuff.”

Those bit items are serious money –  $250,000 and more in some cases, and between $40,000 and $150,000 in many other instances.

Some of the machinery is huge, showing starkly just how far the use of land has come since the Fieldays began 43 years ago.

Tractors have a capacity of more than 200 horse-power; they carry more than 400 litres of fuel; their cabs are air-conditioned and ate fitted with all sorts of the fancy extras; the vehicle has automatic four-wheel drive and diff-lock. Their front wheels are hugely bigger than the rear wheels on our little Fergie 35 that we thought was so smart and powerful.

There are crop-cutters; enormous forage harvesters with 8.5-metre cutters and tyres big enough to use as a seaside bach; and the complexities of some of the seed-sowing units, with their sprawling rows of seed-line cutters and festoons of hoses to feed the seeds into the ground, are really  complex pieces of equipment.

There are mowers and rollers and hay-balers and ploughs and post rammers, all of them big and heavy and made of slabs of solid steel.

They are all the foundation of what the National Fieldays is all about.

And the sales-people are hoping, fervently, that this year the farmers need to buy them.