Four policemen in safety vest spend the week at Agricultural High School training young tractor drivers with rural aspects of the Highway Code. Ride and descend carefully from the cabin, check the weight of the load, check blind spots when maneuvering in reverse … Four police officers, specifically CRS, spend the week at the agricultural school to give road safety courses to students who, for the most part, already drive tractors.
“There is no” tractor “license in France, says Brigadier Jacques Provost. From the age of 16, a youngster can drive a tractor up to 40 tones if he is attached to a farm. In general, they are trained more or less quickly by their parents or the training supervisors. They often take bad habits. We, we come to thwart them! ”
The day alternates theory and practice: “We do not teach them how to use the tractor for work on the farm or in the fields, but we talk to them about the rules of the road to keep the road safety, which they are subjected like all drivers: farmers spend 25 % of their time on the road, the farms are growing, they buy farms in the neighboring villages, etc. Much emphasis is placed on reversing: visual inspection of blind spots and use of mirrors with a towed tool. Every year, there are 15 to 20 accidents in France where farmers crush their children. It’s terrible and the figure does not go down. There is a race for performance with speed and overload. Tractors, in principle limited to 40 tones, sometimes damage the weighbridges intended for 50 tones. They are 60 or 65 tones in fact. There is no technical control for the rolling stock.
“For the overload nobody is in order, confirm the apprentices in BEPA who were trained yesterday. As long as it does not overflow, we charge! Same for the height of the straw, it’s good as long as it goes under the wires. Put on the safety belt, have the gray card, a triangle and a yellow vest in the cabin: the young people smile. “This is the demonstration; you have to look behind, and so on. But if you take that long time to carry the straw boots, the boss will not be very happy. ”