Bronwen Knows Best

Bronwen Sinnot and her partner Martin Burt live on a picturesque 5 acre bush property in Gembrook, Victoria. "We bought this property because we love nature and living in the hills" explained Bronwen. "We built a rustic home that is environmentally friendly and works in with the natural surroundings. Although much of the land is bush we had to develop some of it for practical day to day living.

Until recently we have been doing work around the place the hard way. The builders cut in a rough driveway but we were left with something that was pretty well impassable in winter. So we had 20 tonnes of road base delivered and we were crazy enough to do it by hand! It took us weekend after weekend with no more than shovels, wheel barrows and rakes. We got it done but it nearly killed us. We had similar experiences with carting firewood out of steep gullies.

We looked at all the other projects that were ahead of us such as putting in a small dam, building a vegetable garden and putting down toppings on the driveway. We just knew we had to get something to "move stuff around" on the property or we would be at it forever.

Martin had in mind that we should get an excavator of some sort. While they are great for digging that is pretty much all you can do with them. As I have spent a fair bit of time around farms, I figured we could get a lot more use out of a tractor. Martin had seen ads for "hobby farm" tractors and figured they were no more than overgrown ride on lawn mowers. But we sorted this all out when we went to the Farm World Field Day at Warragul. We got to see together that there are some great compact tractors that are a lot more substantial than that. And when fitted with earth moving attachments there is just so much you can do with them.

As you can imagine there were plenty of brands on display at the field day. We ended up spending a lot of time with the guys from East Wind because they were very helpful in answering all of our questions without any pressure. They also had a great tractor package that really met our needs and our budget as well.

We ended up choosing a 30HP, 4WD model with a front end loader and because they were such great value we got the back hoe as well. The whole package cost us less than $30,000 for a brand new machine. We have found that the 4WD is really handy for getting around on the steep parts of the property. We were able to effortlessly cart up a bucketful of firewood in a matter of minutes that before would have meant several wheel barrow loads and hours of hard work. The bucket is also very handy as you can split it open and close it to grab things like logs.

The backhoe has been put to good use building a small dam. No doubt this could have been done faster with an excavator but it got the job done and we can do so much more with the tractor. The first time we took the backhoe off it was a bit fiddly but then we figured we better read the instructions - it's been a breeze since then!

I really enjoyed putting in the vegetable patch. We opted for a raised bed and used the soil we dug out from the dam. It was just so easy pushing the logs into position and dumping the soil in with the front end loader.

It's been a few years since I had driven a tractor but this machine is a lot of fun to drive. For a 30HP tractor it is quite compact and negotiates around the trees well. I love the shuttle shift that makes it really easy to change between forward and reverse gears and Martin now agrees it is the best thing we ever bought."