Chips are down for agricultural haulage

Nobody in the road freight sector will need reminding of the vast list of rules and regulations that control the trucks we use and how we use them. Pursuing UK drivers and hauliers with missionary zeal are the police Vosa the Traffic Commissioners the Highways Agency (HA) the DVLA the Driver Support Agency Defra and its enforcement officers Speed Camera Partnerships and, of course local authorities with their own sets of regulations. The upside of this red tape is the high standard of engineering and safety met by the trucks running on UK roads.

But what most people in the industry are not aware of is the massive weights that agricultural tractor/trailer combinations are running at on A and B-roads. Our experience points to weights of 35 tonnes and more, 25 tonnes of which is pounding down on the single towing eye of a four-axle unit with no air brakes and no minimum tread depth on the trailer tyres, which might well be driven by a 17-year-old on a provisional licence.

Arcane knowledge

Should you want to find out the legal GVW of an agricultural tractor and trailer combination as set out by transport law today you will have quite a job on your hands. We trawled through the websites of Vosa, Defra, the DVLA and the HA and were unable to extract a clear figure. Finally we tracked down the Vosa technical officer on this matter who explained that the maximum legal train weight for such a combination is 24,390kg. In addition, despite rumblings which might lead to changes in the law, there is currently no annual test for these vehicles - and where there is regulation, it goes pretty much unenforced. For starters, how many farm tractors do you see with an O-licence, even though many habitually operate beyond their 15-mile operating radius?

Likewise, how many of them operate under tachograph rules? Not any that we know of. Wherever we looked when investigating this topic we found that the current situation is, to put it mildly, shoddy. To identify a tractor driver who, for instance, sideswipes a car, you might find, if you are lucky, that he has a number plate on the rear of the trailer. However 50 such units may have the same number plate if they are operated by the same farm operation. And if you manage to turn around safely and pursue him you would then have to overtake him - particularly challenging if he is towing a 3m-wide piece of equipment - stop him, identify him, and then make your complaint.

A farm worker with a 300hp tractor and trailer can work 100 hours a week and in the process haul more than 2,000 tonnes of produce over 1,500 miles with no legal restrictions. Most hauliers would be hard-pressed to shift 500 tonnes on a 44-tonne artic on short runs legally. It's a shocking fact that a 17-year-old novice driver is allowed to get behind the wheel an agricultural artic and drive it on the public highway, simply because of 'agricultural exemptions'. And this at a time when transient government ministers are going on about raising the car driving age to 18 and introducing a minimum requirement of 500 hours of training.

JJ Bardon spent five gruelling weeks hauling potatoes with agricultural tractor and trailer combinations in Herefordshire and Shropshire. His report is depressing - and frightening. Having hooked up my Fendt 924 and heavy-duty trailer I set out with 18 othertractor/trailer combinations and their mostly young novice drivers for the harvesting fields in east Herefordshire. There are at least 150 other similar combinations on the roads around us in Hereford and Shropshire. I'm soon loaded up and pull out onto the road. The unit pulls well enough but chucks heavily and I can feel the very heavy load throughout the 21-mile journey back to base through numerous villages and roundabouts in urban and rural areas. I drive on to the scales in the complex before tipping the load and up on the screen comes 37,400kg!

On most days we make three round trips totalling 150 miles, so in seven days we're covering nearly 1,100 miles. I work from 7am to between 9pm and 11pm every day and get a maximum of five hours' sleep, but I just have to keep going. Most of the drivers are running through roundabouts at almost full speed - about 33mph - fully loaded and frequently on their mobile phones as well. This gives a visible whiplash effect to the drawbar and the wheel studs of these very large and heavy trailers, some of which are brand new. This flat-out running inevitably begins to take its toll with tractors and trailers needing studs tightened. A piston has gone on one tractor and another 06-reg unit needs some attention to its gearbox.

There's a problem with one combination which has an excessive weight of 36,000kg - the hydraulic rams won't lift the body of the trailer to tip the load. They disconnect one of the three rams to give the pump more capacity. This actually works, but it will probably cause long-term damage. Late one night a tractor/trailer combination in front of me just made it off the A49 into the entrance of the complex when it lost a complete rear-axle unit and a wheel from the tractor. On leaving a difficult field in the north of the county in week three, running at least 36,000kg, I find I am getting severe brake fade as I come down a gradient at least a mile long with a geriatric driver in front of me who is slowing to a crawl. Fortunately I manage not to hit her.

On my return to the workshop I find the reason: a leaking air valve on the trailer. I notice there is no tread at all on two tyres on one side of the same trailer I picked up two hours earlier. I learn to my horror there is no legal limit on tread depth on agricultural trailer tyres in the UK. As long as there's no wire protruding from the tyre, it seems you can carry on. Fifteen weeks of tractor/trailer work at 14 hours a day on a potato harvest is more work than the tractors will do in the rest of the year and most of the trailers are not serviced or prepared for this intensive work period. The vast majority of heavy-duty (240-300hp) tractors have their steering set up for ploughing fields, not for hauling a 25-tonne load on blacktop. The power steering is extremely high geared and overreacts on an asphalt surface which feels really dangerous.

In addition, if the variomatic models are over-revved they cut out, losing the power steering and braking - and this usually occurs when gearing down on a severe decent. The only way to regain control is to switch the ignition off and on again rapidly and select a high gear. One Sunday an experienced relief driver stands in for me. On the last journey back to the depot late at night he forgets to engage the electronic lock for the hydraulics and accidentally nudges the tail-gate lever, spreading 10 tonnes of spuds and soil over a mile of the A49. As it was Sunday night there was very little traffic and nobody was injured. This could happen to any driver, but such incidents are inevitable when working so intensively over long periods.

The incidents that are being played out around us become the subject of daily conversations with the drivers I'm working with. One day I get into an argument with the farm manager and the drivers about the use of flashing beacons - they claim they are only legally required on dual carriageways. In fact the law states that their use is also required wherever and whenever a hazard is present and I continue to use mine wherever it is called for - for which I get much abuse. These same drivers refuse to use them even when travelling through very narrow lanes with high hedges and have to back up with the loaded trailer lifted, day and night, to let other traffic pass.

One day we come upon Vosa officers in shiny new vehicles who have set up shop in a lay-by on the A49. They stop only commercial vehicles for most of the day despite dozens of agricultural tractor/trailer combinations flying by every hour, all grossly overloaded at this point in the journey. Finally, in the late afternoon, they stop one of our kind and he gets done for two minor light and drawbar height offences. Amazingly the Vosa officers do not weigh the unit they simply ask how much weight he is carrying. A figure is quoted. They take that unit off the road there and then - but only for the drawbar clearance offence, not the overload.

A 10-year-old child could have seen what the main offence was! One of the most hair-raising activities in potato harvesting has to be putting a loose trailer cover on 20 tonnes of spuds at the side of the road on heavy rain - especially when the load is right up to the edge of the trailer. All of this is carried out while balancing on the edge of the load, grappling with a wet, slippery cover that can only go on one way round, standing nine foot above the ground. Outrageously, none of these trailers have adequate steps or grab handles - this is a great way to obtain a permanent knee injury. If health and safety want to do something useful in the agricultural industry then they should carry out this procedure a few dozen times and then ban loose covers on agricultural vehicles outright.

My combination, now a 56-reg John Deer 6920S and a 15m3 trailer, is heading out one morning having just had the fuel filters changed because of sluggish pulling uphill the night before, when it becomes very noisy and dies on the side of the road. After skilled examination a broken crankshaft is revealed on this brand new tractor. There then comes a lengthy recovery procedure to get the vehicle back on the road. One thing's for sure: this has been the one and only potato harvest I will risk my life and licence on. Give me back my Scania.