The Rubber Track Revolution

For heavy farm work, crawler tractors with steel tracks have long been a favourite option, offering high tractive power with lower compaction than wheeled tractors.

However, these machines do have disadvantages including limited mobility, relatively high track wear-rate and unsuitability for driving on roads. Their main competitor has been the four-wheel drive tractor.

However, in 1987 Challenger introduced the Challenger 65 model with a startling innovation: rubber-belt drive to replace rubber tyres.

This combined the traction advantages of traditional crawlers with the mobility of four-wheel drive machines. In 1990 Track Marshall followed with its 210 horsepower TM200.

From that time rubber tracks have been a steadily increasing sight on Britain's farms, with a claim to offer less soil compaction than their wheeled counterparts. In 2010 Chris Lockwood has filmed 23 examples of those to be seen today, from the Cat Challenger 65 to the latest John Deere 9630T and Challenger MT865C. He shows them working on British farms subsoiling, ploughing, cultivating, pressing and drilling. The story that Chris tells is one of a dramatic increase in horsepower from the 200 mark up to nearly 600.

This is coupled to an increasing technical sophistication, with GPS technology and automatic steering becoming routine.