The real Tractor Boys!

THE boys were hooked as soon as they saw the tractors in the field. In fact, it’s Jonathan Whitlam’s earliest memory. He reckons he must have been only two or three years old when he peered through the window of the back bedroom and watched peas being harvested only 20 feet behind his home. Today, he can tell you that the machinery involved was yellow Mather & Platt viners being pulled by Muir-Hill tractors – the detail proof that he was well and truly bitten by the bug.

Stephen Richmond, whose family lived just a few doors down the road, was a few years younger and reckons he must have been aged four or five when he witnessed a similar scene from his bedroom – though obviously at a different time to Jonathan. “From then on I just fell in love with tractors and farming.”

They met later – beginning a lifelong friendship founded on a deep mutual passion for agriculture.

“I can remember walking past his house towards a field – I think I was going to look at a combine – and there he was outside, playing with his toy tractors,” says Stephen. “From then on, we’d play with our Britains tractors together and pretend we had our own farms.

“Jonathan says he can actually remember me in a pram! There were two Massey Ferguson 165s fertiliser-spreading on the field and I sort of looked up and went ‘Tractor!’ He always tells that story.”

They grew up and, when they could operate a camera, were wont to spend all day together, walking the fields during school holidays, chatting to agricultural workers and taking pictures of the machinery. “If you wanted to know where we were, we’d be in a field. That’s where we spent our youth, to be honest. Sad, isn‘t it!” chuckles Stephen.

Their enthusiasm got them into a spot of bother now and again.

“If they were pea-vining on the field while I was at middle school, I’d pretend I wanted to go to the toilet and of course I went straight up to watch them on the field near the playing field,” he confesses. “About half an hour later the teacher came after me, wondering what had happened.

“I was driven. If I was inside and there was a pea-viner, I had to be outside and watching it!”

For Jonathan, who also went to Gisleham Middle School, the strategy during harvest-time was less subtle. “I just didn’t go in for lessons; stayed out until I got told off!” he laughs.

By the mid 1990s they’d accumulated between them more than 10,000 photographs of farming life and it was time to share their passion with the wider world. The friends published Modern Tractors in 1996 and further books followed.

Modern Tractors proved a hit. “Our claim to fame is we got on television, on Channel 4, on a programme called The Girlie Show,” says Stephen. “We got a bit of mickey taken out of us, but we didn’t mind, because it was great publicity!”

After the printed word came videotapes. Then, at the start of 2009, they launched Tractor Barn Productions to produce their own DVD programmes. The initial release was Working Tractors, and now comes The Pea Files: Harvesting the most-easterly peas in Britain.

Not just for agricultural “anoraks”, the 80-minute documentary reminds us how the industry in north Suffolk and south Norfolk grew during the 20th Century, came to an abrupt and sad end last year when Birds Eye stopped freezing local peas, and is as we speak rising afresh.

It was early in 2010 that Birds Eye announced “with deep regret” it would no longer be sourcing peas from Suffolk and Norfolk. The primary cause, it said, was the cancellation by Unilever in Italy of a significant export contract.

Some of the farms had been supplying the frozen food group for 64 years and the overall loss of income was put at more than �5million. It was no consolation that Birds Eye would still be taking peas from the fertile fields of Perthshire, the rich soil of Lincolnshire, and East Yorkshire with its well-drained chalky ground.

All seemed lost and that unforeseen silence last year – no laden lorries trundling towards Lowestoft for processing – really hurt the boys. The town used to be a real hive of activity during the season.

“It was awful,” admits Jonathan. “If I hadn’t had so many other projects on the go with DVDs I’d have been up in Lincolnshire, filming peas. It didn’t seem right not having them.

“I know why the peas are so fascinating: it’s because it’s the only thing left of how farming used to be, in the ’60s and ’70s, where there’s a group of people working together. Farming’s mostly machines now; it’s one person, maybe two, working. With a pea gang, you get six or seven working together.”

Happily, normality has been restored in 2011 after Anglian Pea Growers – a co-operative of 150 farmers – clinched a deal with Ardo UK. Produce is once again being frozen in Oulton Broad, before being packed in Kent.

Optimism abounds – particularly with APG investing more than �1m in three state-of-the-art harvesters to pick more than 7,500 acres of peas. Costing about �350,000 a pop, the machines have come from a company called PMC, based at Fakenham in Norfolk, that’s been part of the pea story over the decades.

The Pea Files DVD shows how much things have changed, and how some aspects remain constant.

During the heydays of the 1960s and 1970s thousands of tons of peas went to Lowestoft to be canned or frozen. The Co-op had a canning factory and there was also Mortons. Today, in their places, stand offices, an Asda and derelict land. Then, over the bridge at Ness Point, Birds Eye began freezing the crop as well. “The factory’s still there, but its days of handling peas are long gone and for most of the year this most easterly of spots is only home to noisy seagulls,” explains Stephen’s narration.

The family of Graham Richmond (no relation to Stephen) has farmed at Blundeston for eons and was growing peas in the 1920s. The enterprise would later be one of the early growers for the Co-op.

Graham explains how his grandfather grew peas in the 1940s. Harvest was arranged by the East Suffolk Executive Committee, or “War-Ag”, as it was known. With a shortage of labour, the work was done by prisoners of war.

War-Ag charged �46 for harvesting. Haulage was �26 and the return from the crop was �425, “which was a lot of money in 1945”. Corn and wheat on the farm made about �200 less.

Trouble was, you couldn’t always get the War-Ag gang when you needed them for harvesting.

Peas are a delicate and often difficult crop. They need moisture at the right times, but also don’t like standing in wet soil.

Graham recounts how the crop had to meet factory requirements, too. The Co-op, for instance, required peas to be a certain shade, and not bleached by the sun. He remembers his father being anxious about how things were going.

Pigeons were a pain, too. On the DVD he demonstrates an early acetylene “banger” from the late 1950s, used to scare birds. It ran on grey/blue calcium carbide to which water was added to produce acetylene gas. This was ignited by a spark from a flint.

Changes in technique and machinery are charted in the film, using visuals that include archive material shot for Anglia TV’s Farming Diary programme, as well as stills and newer footage, such as the 2007 and 2009 harvests.

In the 1940s the job was done much more by hand. Graham’s father had his own brainwaves about speeding up harvesting, by dreaming up a fork modification for his Ferguson tractor and adding two ex-Army wheels to the attachment. The pea factory wasn’t overly impressed, as the arrangement picked up a fair number of stones that went into its processing machinery!

Farm manager John Want explains what it was like working on the pea-cutters in years gone by. The aroma was lovely and the peas “hung like grapes”.

His tractor didn’t have a cabin and it could be perishing cold at night. He complained a bit and got a canvas cab, which was cosy – though moths and flies did get trapped inside with him!

Paul Reeve remembers being aged about seven, in the latish 1960s, standing in the corner of a field and watching the harvest with fascination. He’d enjoy lifts on the heavily-laden lorries bound for the factories.

“Every tree between the field and Lowestoft had ornaments of pea-haulm (stems or stalks) hanging from it, which local boys would try to knock off with sticks.” Paul later got a job in the industry.

Technology developed as the years rolled by, with advances such as cutter-rowers, the mobile pea viner, and the FMC firm’s first self-propelled picker in the late 1970s.

Some steps were major ones: the arrival of the 979 six-wheel harvester at the end of the 1980s, for instance. A “real monster” designed for greater output, it was quieter, had electronic controls and gave the operator a more comfortable ride.

But pea production always had team-work at its heart – a raised-pulse, all-hands-to-the-pump, 24/7 race to gather in the crop in peak condition.

Certainly there’s a sense of romance and unity about the work – captured perfectly on the DVD when harvesting goes on past sunset. “As night fell the field became a completely different world, with just the lights of the machines breaking the inky blackness,” says Stephen.

As time passed, Mortons and the Co-op fell by the wayside. Into the 21st Century and only Birds Eye was left processing peas in the Lowestoft area.

Stephen and Jonathan captured for posterity scenes from the 2009 harvest – one of the best ever – but on a warm August night no-one knew a seismic eruption was coming.

Birds Eye’s pulling out was truly the end of an era. Farmers’ plans were wrecked. Some crews found work with small vining teams in other parts of East Anglia or Hull, but most had to try to secure other gainful employment.

For the Tractor Barn duo, too, there was a gaping hole. Both men had followed the pea harvest for as long as they could remember.

“You get to June and July and we’re on tenterhooks, wanting to see the lorries go past,” says Stephen.

“As soon as we see that, we find out where they are and plan to find them at least a few times, and also try to follow them during the night.

“In 2009 we found them about five o’clock (pm), I think, and stayed until three in the morning. Thinking about it now, we must be mad!’”

News that pea-growing was back this year was, then, like Christmas come early.

The 2011 harvest began in the middle of June and the boys have already got 10 or 11 hours of footage and about 1,000 photographs under their belts.

Where once they had to physically hunt down harvesting teams, they’ve long been such familiar faces on the scene that a phone call or two keeps them in the loop.

“Of all the farming activities, we really do love it with a passion,” says Stephen. “To get a machine that can shell a pea without damaging it is amazing, and if you ever go on a field when they’ve just been harvested, the smell is intoxicating.

“We often get the mickey taken out of us because we describe it with a bit of the passion of making love, really!”

The edge of excitement is often palpable.

“There’s nothing on the farm that can compare. The wheat, barley, sugar beet . . . it’s all nice, but there’s not such a precise military operation to get the crop in.”

• The Pea Files DVD is available from Old Pond Publishing of Ipswich at �16.95. Web links: www.oldpond.com and www.tractorbarnproductions.com

The best office in the world!

STEPHEN Richmond – growing up surrounded by fields in the village of Gisleham, near Kessingland – wanted nothing more than a job in agriculture. And he got one.

The electrician’s son left school at 16, in the May of 1992, and joined Raven & Son, at White House Farm, Henstead – not far from home. He was in his element, and is still there, doing work he loves.

The job is varied: a lot of tractor driving – transporting corn, carting muck, sugar beet harvesting and so on – or in the workshop, making or fixing something.

“I always say to people ‘I’ve got the best office in the world. Look up at the sky – that’s my office.’ Fantastic.”

Away from work and it’s a bit of a busman’s holiday, with matters agricultural occupying a lot of time for Stephen and fellow enthusiast Jonathan.

Following their success in bringing out books, they got a video camera and began producing documentary tapes for other companies. Then, at the start of 2009, they launched Tractor Barn Productions to cut out the middle man and produce their own DVD titles.

“I’m on the tractor during the day and then go home and edit programmes with tractors in; and then go to sleep thinking about tractors!” chuckles Stephen, who generally concentrates on narration and editing while Jonathan takes care of writing and filming.

They’ve also got a collection of historic farm vehicles, mainly Leylands.

Does it ever all get too much, with life dominated by agriculture?

“To be honest, no! Sad as that may sound, I don’t think it ever will be. If I’m not working on the farm or sitting at the computer, editing, Jonathan and me will go off like we did when we were children, and spend a day looking at tractors.

“Saturday we were with the pea-vine and followed them for a day, taking pictures and video. My other half might think that’s a bit too much, but I don’t!”

Stephen, who lives near Lowestoft, has three children, including a little girl born a fortnight or so ago.

Do the Tractor Barn boys get their legs pulled because of their obsession with farming – especially the historical angle?

“We used to get the mickey taken about being trainspotters, but since we started the company people tend to take us more seriously and appreciate what we do.

“Most of the people we meet are like-minded, so that’s probably why. Yeah, you get the odd one or two. But we don’t mind; we defend ourselves and have a joke with them. I think we often ‘turn them around’ and they go away thinking ‘Well, actually they’re not that strange . . . not a bad hobby . . . !’”

A real marathon . . . but worth it

HERE’S commitment. Jonathan Whitlam left Suffolk at 3am one morning this week, bound for Lancashire . . . to film four new Claas combines in the same barley field. He got back to his home near Lowestoft at 8pm, and the morning after the night before is feeling the effects a little.

The trip was worth it, though, because to see a quartet working together was quite something. “All lined up, coming across the field, it looked really good. You don’t see that much nowadays, because there are great big ones that do the job of five.”

The chance arose because a chap who bought a Tractor Barn DVD got chatting to the creators. He knew of this contractor in the north, told them about the job planned, and sorted out the details. It was clearly a wonderful opportunity to capture some evocative footage.

Like his childhood Gisleham neighbour, Jonathan also yearned for a career – despite his father’s warning. His dad worked on the land and exhorted: “Don’t go into farming. It’s the worst thing you can do!”

In the end it was fate that popped his dream. Jonathan had a Youth Training place lined up on a farm, but became very ill with stomach trouble just before he was due to start. The opportunity was lost and he couldn’t secure another chance.

Instead, he worked for a decade at an aquatic centre in Kessingland – fish being another interest at the time.

Agriculture still features significantly in his life, however – and not just as a hobby. For the past five or six years he’s been helping out with potato harvesting and other tasks in north Suffolk – driving John Deere tractors, mostly, and having great fun. Mind you, that’s been curtailed this year so he can concentrate on filming for Tractor Barn Productions.

Jonathan is, though, helping a mate who’s got one of the biggest Claas combines in the world: a giant with a 35ft-wide cutting mechanism. He also does building work with a friend . . . while dreaming that, one day, Tractor Barn might grow into a full-time enterprise.

That pea slogan . . .

OLDER readers – ahem – will remember the jingle “Sweet as the moment the pod went pop”. It was used in jaunty Birds Eye TV adverts in the late 1960s and 1970s – one of which featured a youthful Patsy Kensit, now known for her role in Holby City. She would put a finger in her mouth and make a popping sound.