My father is not one to get too excited about things. No rush, no stress, just takes everything at a nice, sedate pace.

So when he went off to get parts to attempt to fix our old Zetor, I expected him to return around dinnertime, when we could merrily argue our way into the evening trying to figure out the issues in the fuel line. It came as a complete surprise then to get a text from him out of the blue telling me he had “bought a four-wheel-drive tractor”.

And they say females are compulsive shoppers.

Truth be told, we don’t know ourselves since we have it, though having never used a tractor with either a four-wheel drive or a front loader, there was a steep learning curve to overcome.

The less said about how long it took me to find reverse the better, though I should have realised something was different when I had a gear stick on each side of me.

After a few days of practice, we both had it off and it was initiated with the main crop of bales in the first week of July.

We had a bumper crop with the mild spring, getting 120% of our usual total.

Coupled with the bales left over from last year and more hay made just last week, we have a nice reserve built up if the weather decides to take a turn for the worse in autumn.

And just in case we were feeling a bit too smug about how smoothly our baling went, we also did a couple of small meadows in cocks of hay. This certainly made us more appreciative of having balers around, though I can’t say I was disappointed to find out a front-loader will carry cocks of hay quite easily.