Italian invasion

My first experiences of the silage harvest date from the 1980s, when I was growing up in a small village near the town of Lowestoft in Suffolk. Surrounded by several farms, the largest was a mixed unit owned by Bryan and Neville Collens, and one of my favourite times of the year was when they began the ryegrass harvest.

The 150 head of cattle spent the summer out on the local marshes and part of the winter out on the arable fields, eating stubble turnips, while additional feed was grown in the shape of grass silage from a further acreage of marshes, as well as from Italian ryegrass grown as part of the arable rotation. This followed on from a wheat crop sown in early autumn and then harvested in late spring, before the land was then sown with sugar beet.

The farm had been almost exclusively run with Leyland tractors in the 1970s and Nuffield machines before that but, since the late 1970s, Lamborghini tractors had gradually been replacing the earlier British-built machines and when looking back at these