During peak season, the tractor cab may be home for up to 14 hours/day, seven days/week. Manufacturers are well aware of this, and recognise that a farmer’s perception of their particular platform is a crucial factor in the tractor buying process. With this in mind, we, together with Dutch magazine Trekker & Werktuig, compared 12 cabs on 100hp tractors

Some things in life just don’t look or feel right. Strawberries in winter, Horlicks in summer, cricketers in psychedelic shell suits, golfers dressed in grim grey… And so on. Climb into an unfamiliar tractor cab, and you could be forgiven for feeling much the same.

For human beings are creatures of habit; they tend not to like change unless they can see an extremely good and valid reason for it. Surely you must have heard of the tractor driver who refused to give up his much-loved steed, days after the keys to his shiny new model had been proudly presented to him. No logic to it, but then familiarity is a strange and powerful emotion.

That said, familiarity and fondness are not necessarily the best judges of what constitutes the optimum driving position; consecutive hours spent in a seemingly comfortable but technically incorrect posture may well have long term implications to driver health and performance. For these reasons we asked an ergonomics expert to help us with our test.

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