Farmers’ Films  
VHS Video, PAL format
 
East Anglian Film Archive  
Released 2003
 
 
58 minutes
 
Price £14.95 including VAT
   
  
 
ISBN 0-903366-68-2
 
 

A programme of six short films, mostly from the 1950s, shot by farmers on their own farms. The East Anglian Film Archive invited the farmers or their relatives to give a commentary on each film in the 1990s. Most of the farms were large for their day, employing 20 or more men who still worked with the horses that were giving way to a wide assortment of tractors, early combines and other harvesters.
Although the commentaries vary in content, two of them are very precise about the details of the equipment shown. The locations of the farm were in Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. The emphasis is on field operations including celery planting (on your knees), deep ploughing and a wide range of harvests.

  Farmer's Films - East Anglian Film Archive  
  At haymaking and harvest everyone was pressed into service.
Much farm work was laborious and slow.
 
  Rotaped tracks, introduced in 1946, were claimed to increase pulling power by up to 70 per cent.