A Lincolnshire Film Archive Presentation

Farming on Film 1955-79 is the second in a series of bygone farming video compilations which use moving picture film shot on real farms by farmers and their employees in the decades following the Second World War. They proudly filmed their newest acquisitions, but at the same time recorded shots of 'The way Dad used to do it' as a reminder to future generations.

Drawing on this archive material this video illustrates the changes affecting different farms at different times, from the middle 1950s to the late 1970s. Scenes of horse and tractor drilling, corn binding and carting, threshing and stack building sit side by side with images of self-propelled combines, automatic bailers, men riding the bale sledge while haymaking, and a range of attachments that made even the most humble tractor a do-it-all machine.

Vintage Fordsons and Little Grey Fergies are seen at work as well as larger 4 x 4 Muir-Hill machines. Back breaking jobs such as thinning sugar beet, potato planting and harvesting apples are shown, as are winter tasks like drainage trenching, hedge cutting and fencing.

The sugar beet campaign, the change to intensive livestock production and training 'the farmers of the future' at agricultural college in the 1960s are also featured.

Written and narrated by Alan Stennett.

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4:3 - PAL - All regions