Growing up on a Farm - Meet Peter Nixey
A farm’s tractor history :
Since joining Anglo Agriparts in January in 2019, it was the first year that I had not been involved in some way in the harvest. I didn’t realize it would actually affect me! At the sight of a combine harvester, I now feel a slight urge to run down the field, rip open the door and take over. I’ve managed to control it so far, but the feeling is growing. If I spot an old axial flow in a field, I may take some stopping!
My family moved to France from the UK in 2000. We brought with us all the equipment from our farm in the UK. Today however, we are almost entirely kitted out with Case IH equipment:
3 Case magnums (72 series) these do most of the soil moving and baling.
2 maxxums (52 series) that most of the work on the farm and probably deserve a little TLC. These do everything from grass work to hedge trimming and fert spreading.
Since we have owned these tractors they have never been to a dealership for a repair.
The rest of the work is done by a Zetor forterra with a front loader, and a JCB.
Also of note is our current combine: 2366 axial flow, this is the one I learnt to drive.
But it wasn’t always that way, only two of those tractors came from the UK with us: one magnum, the only tractor my father has ever bought new and one Maxxum, bought from Farol back when they were Case dealers.
I had to ask my father about these because being 5 at the time, I had forgotten some of them:
When we first moved over, we also had a Massey 8110 that according to my dad was “dreadful”, it was gladly sold to a farmer in Brittany and we have never touched another Massey since.
A John Deere 3050 that I can only remember as having been split in order to change the clutch and being left in a shed, in that way, for a couple of months until my father had time to put it back together, this was sold to an exporter in the Netherlands.
My personal favourite was the white Case. A Case 4690 with duals on turned some heads in France. Considering in our area at the time, 100 horsepower was considered a big tractor, this one was incredible. When it was in a field, people would stop on the side of the road to get a better look. Sadly, the engine was knackered, so it was sold to a farmer in the south of France.
We’ve had three combines in the 20 years we’ve been in France: an MF40 which was built by Dronningborg and sold to an exporter to be shipped to Russia, we found out later that after unloading it, the Russians tried to drive it to the farm it had been sold to. After driving 200 km on the road in Russia, the poor thing’s engine exploded.
This was replaced with a 2188 axial flow, which I remember spending many a summer inside, trying to repair, before it decided to shake itself to bits in some new way. It was sold for export again. Two Ukrainians arrived to pick it up, with a dodgy looking trailer, which was way too narrow to take the machine. They had expected every farm big enough to have a combine also to have a crane that would be used to load the combine after the wheels had been taken off. Obviously, we didn’t. We ended up building a sort of ramp in order to drive it onto the trailer and then take the wheels off and drop it onto the bed of the trailer. This took several days to do, during which time, the lorry drivers who had been to Amsterdam before stopping at ours seemed to live off black coffee and an entire Gouda that they had hidden in the cab with them.
That’s the complete history of all the tractors on Nixey SCEA.
