With two young children, one now at primary school, the annual harvest festival offered another excuse to borrow a tractor and take it into school for the pupils and staff to see.
This year, Massey Ferguson kindly sorted a machine for us and, despite it being a rural Herefordshire primary school surrounded by cider apple orchards, many of my son's classmates and the teaching staff had not been up close to a tractor before.
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Squeezing the machine onto the playground through gates designed for a sports field mower was one challenge, but the reward of being able to show the machinery and technology we use in agriculture to an audience who appeared genuinely interested was a highlight.
The misconceptions about the assumed simplicity of machinery, thanks to countless urban-based marketing businesses who think we all live in 1970 and bump along on pressed-steel seats, aren't new. But the lack of recognition of just how much machinery costs, how much risk is involved in producing crops and how little farmers are paid is also really highlighted when a machine dedicated to food production is parked outside a school.
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I'd encourage anyone with time and access to machinery to do something similar. It isn't difficult to bring kit to schools and make learning a bit more real, but it also gives another opportunity for agriculture to connect with the general public and dispel a few more myths about the industry. Plus, getting something through a gateway it really isn't designed for always brings a bit of a thrill.
