Farmers | Richard Hammond's Tech Head

Farmers.
Risking their lives every day to keep you in corn flakes.
Seriously, farmers
(and farmettes - they’re the lady farmers)
are hard men.
And women.
If I were farmering, I’d be worried about catching mad chicken disease
or getting a tongue-splinter from the piece of hay
lazily dangling from the side of my mouth.
Yet farmers face these and many other risks every day.
Get this - farmers work outside
even if it's raining.
And as if that wasn’t enough,
they also have to fiddle about with
some of the deadliest equipment known to man.
Or woman.
Just be thankful you’ve got the sort of job that
allows you to surf the web for videos like this.
Sure it might get a little boring at times,
but you’re not going to lose an arm
if you stick to using a mouse.
Not so with the ‘Shelton Super Trencher’.
Designed to let farmers dig big trenches very quickly,
it is - put simply - an enormous, fast-rotating, wheel of death.
I think they put ‘Super’ in the title
to make it sound more friendly than it really is.
Then there’s the ‘Tractor Mounted Log-Splitter’.
What could possibly go wrong when you spend all day in close proximity
to a device designed purely for splitting things in half?
People aren't like worms;
cut a human in half and you don't end up with two smaller people,
just one broken person and a rigorous police enquiry.
The Teknamotor Skorpion
- spelt with a ‘k’ cos this thing’s too hard for a ‘c’
takes whopping great tree trunks
and very quickly turns them into tiny little bits of tree trunk.
Take a step too close at any point during your thirteen hour working day
and they’ll be clearing you up with a shovel and four bin bags.
If my calculations are correct,
this thing can mince approximately two hundred people per hour.
Although that would require some sort of conveyor belt arrangement
which could be tricky to explain away in a court of law.
“But what about the Lamier Kirogn?”
I have no way of hearing you ask.
This one’s like something out of a Clive Barker novel.
Or a ‘Saw’ film.
Or ‘Dead Rising 2’ on the PS3,
depending on how old you are.
If you’re unsure, ask a Frenchman to help with the pronunciation
because they invented the thing.
But don’t ask a Frenchman to demonstrate it.
In fact, don’t ask anyone to demonstrate it
because it’s really just five jagged rotating blades
mounted on the end of a huge, pivoting steel arm.
The Lamier Kirogn:
keeping France's rural population in check since 1994.
These are serious bits of kit, for serious men.
Or women.
So if you do ever find a severed knuckle in your Weetabix,
don’t blame the farmers.
After all, it could so easily have been a whole hand.
Or an arm.
Although that wouldn’t fit in a box of Weetabix, would it?
Depends on the arm, I suppose…