My uncle and a neighbour used do their silage together in the late 60's early 70's, a 165 and side mounted 43" Taarup single chop and a 10 x 6 KP trailer,drop the harvester after every load and cart to the pit where a cabless 135 and Kverneland trip buckrake was tasked with the job, 3 walled pit in a 25ft x 45ft shed, fill it till you were ducking your head under the roof trusses. I was put on the buckrake at 13, wheelies up the ramp with only the buckrake preventing a complete upset, the 165 got traded for an IH 674 and the cab would be removed at silage time to allow the user reach the spout controls, a stub in the end of the long drawbar allowed it to pick and drop trailers and with the second trailer output was as good as doubled to 7 or 8 acres on a good day, by the mid 70's the job was given to a contractor with a 60" trailed single chop and they used just do the buckraking or more to the point I ended up doing it and following the contractor to the few farms in the locality to buckrake with the farmers own tractor which could be anything from a Ford 2000, DB 780, MF 135 at the lower end or the afore mentioned IH674, a few years on and I was driving a MF 185 with a Taarup double chop that a neighbour bought to do his own and a small bit of contract work, bought a new IH 955 and McConnell hedgecutter of my own in '79 and between hedge cutting and buckraking or pulling someones double chop managed to pay for it, bought a side mounted JF 80 precision chop and used the uncles 135 on a 6'6" krone drum mower to knock the grass and a IH 574 to draw in and hired in a lad to buckrake with a 7600. 4 years with the JF then traded the lot and bought a Deutz DX 6.30 and a Taarup 602B with an 8ft direct cut head, used to have to drop the head and carry it into some fields on the buckrake as it was too wide for a lot of gates at the time, if you wanted to put in wet silage that direct cut was the way to do it, damn near every bit of water on the grass would end up in the trailer, 3 years of that led to a 9ft JD1327 mower and a JD 3760 trailed harvester that would leave the noise in your head even as you slept, a hard yoke to drive with limited output which got changed to Mengele 30 flywheel harvester had us up to 35 acres a day, the Deutz got traded for a DX 6.50 and the ability to do 40 acres, 2 more years and I joined up with another man who was using a JD 3760 behind TW 20 and he took on the mowing duties and I traded Deutz and Mengele for a NewHolland 1905 spfh, 6 years with that but ended up with running the whole show because the other man had health issues, in '97 strarted another shared operation with lads that were using a Pottinger Mex6 and a Fiat 110-90 up to that, the 1905 went in against an FX 375 which ran until 2006, during that spell we ran 2 JD 1360 mowers with groupers for 4 years sometimes grouping to 20's or spreading full width and rowing with a 20' Pottinger but due to labour shortages changed to a 4 metre Krone and a TM175 for mowing and raking everything, upscaled the rake to a Kverneland 9178 to put 8 metres of grass in a row and still had a bit of hired in in the form of 2 tractors and trailers plus drivers and 2 of my own, amalgamated again in 2006 to the current setup with owner driven triple mowers, owner driven loader on the clamp, rowing up and 2 tractor and trailer units are mine, 2 more belong to the mower man, its now 50 years since I was put on the 135 and buckrake and there was always some sort of a shared operation going on whether it be mowing or drawing in or clamping.