Traditionally Fendt tractors had an opening front windscreen. Obviously, Herman, Heide and Helmut liked the wind in their hair and the orchestral sound of an MWM straight-six engine.

And I’m no different. Our Fendt tractors had them, which I liked for two reasons.

Typically, when I’m doing a simple job like gathering up silage bales and cruising with two on the front and two on the back, I’ll open the screen and hit 30km/h in the field. It’s good to get the wind in your hair (or what’s left of it) on a warm summer’s day.

It makes the mundane a mind-blowing experience and gives the cab a good blowout as well.

But an opening windscreen on the sowing tractor was altogether more useful, and this is where my problem arises.

I no longer sow with the older Fendt 718, which has this feature, but the newer 724’s windscreen is a big one-piece curvy expensive affair and it’s fixed. I’d say if you smashed it, FBD might tell you it’d be cheaper to write the tractor off.

So now I can no longer quickly flip open the screen while sowing and give the scavenging seagulls both barrels of the big Beretta blunderbuss.

Hostility

It always worked a treat – frightening the bejaysus out of the gulls – and they’d be gone for the rest of the day. They’re not used to such hostility on the streets of Dublin, where they steal your McDonald’s chips without so much as ‘boo’.

You see, some people actually like to see gulls following the plough or seed drill, but I hate the b******s. They gobble up my vulnerable and precious earthworms at a frantic rate, with extreme speed and efficiency. Teagasc could do some research into this (and forget about bovine emissions for a while) but I’d say a flock of seagulls can greedily devour a huge percentage of the fat worms from a freshly tilled field.

The poor blind earthworm doesn’t stand a chance and before he has time to blink (well, you know what I mean), he’s gone. Ten seconds later, he’s converted into a white gooey mess and anally squirted over the bonnet.

But for all that, the greedy gulls are a creature of wonder. How do they know so quickly that Potterton has pulled out the plough or the drill? It’s not as if they spend their time hanging out in the trees with the crows, awaiting such an opportunity. I’ve never seen a seagull in a tree or on a field power line in my life, and I’d venture to say that you haven’t either.

Feeding frenzy

So how do they know the time is right for an earthworm feeding frenzy? And where do they kip at night? Do they fly back to coastal Balbriggan about 30 miles away (as the seagull flies)? Maybe they’re not even the local seagulls, so as to speak. They could be big ignorant birds coming up from Wicklow.

Maybe RTÉ’s Derek Mooney or Niall Hatch of Birdwatch Ireland could help us with these mysteries. But I really wish they’d stick to McDonald’s and leave my precious worms alone.

But whatever about the seagulls, Teagasc should turn its attention most of all to developing a seed dressing to stop crow attacks. It’s a perennial problem with the early sowing of beans and oats. I’d gladly pay an extra €50/t for a dressing that deterred the crows from digging up seed. But I’d pay double that for a seed dressing that sickened them once and for all.

That would leave me with just the seagulls to deal with. Maybe if we had a McDonald’s in Kildalkey, it would help. But it’d take a brazen bird to steal a chip off a Kildalkey man – they could get a slap.