Mike Hutton: World tractor man

Australia has a reputation of being a leader of agricultural invention, however as great as our achievements have been for the latter part of the twentieth century we benefited from the innovations of a global technological revolution. Service trainers and specialists from across the globe travelled down under to help us understand the machinery our local companies were importing.

Mike Hutton is one of those guys whose wit and intellect provided Ford Tractor Operations technicians with the best training possible. He tells us what he's been doing since his last visit.


My history since last visit to Australia in August 1990

My last visit to FNH Australia was in July 1990 to carry out service training on the 8630 – 8830 16 x 9 Powershift Transmission and an update on the then current Compact Tractors.

At the time of my visit, I was FNH Service Training Manager at the International Training Centre, in Boreham house located in Essex, England.

The job was very hands on and I had a team of four guys. Our responsibility as a department was to create training course material for all tractor and industrial FNH products and carry out service training at Boreham and all locations worldwide except for North America.

This visit was to be my last with the company, as much to my disappointment news broke of the takeover by Fiat Agri while flying between Melbourne and Perth!

During mid 1991 we started to prepare for Series 40 service training which was quite a challenge due to the fact that I had 4 new staff and the advance in technology in the new models.

November 1991 we started S 40 training with 6 weeks of intensive training for FNH company staff from around the world. This was followed by training for dealer staff both at Boreham and around the world.

The complete takeover by Fiat was announced in late 1992 after which redundancies were announced and I took very early retirement in December 1992!

Since then my ‘second’ career continued until 2008 when I retired!

1993 – 1995. I was a self employed trainer and continued working at Boreham, and then Basildon under contract!

1995-2001: I was an instructor at the local Agricultural College in Essex training FNH apprentices on a 4 year part time vocation course.

Also during this time I carried out work for Moffet Engineering in Ireland producing service training manuals for their range of truck mounted forklift trucks.

2001- 2008 I was approached to go back to work for the company, which by this time had become CNH!

During this period I worked as a self employed trainer preparing and conducting service training courses on tractor, industrial and CE products.

My projects included introductory training on the new Compact Tractor Range, CE Telehandlers, Manitou sourced agricultural rough terrain fork lift trucks and finally a new CNH rough terrain fork lift truck range.

Due to ongoing changes within CNH, much of the training materials preparations were taken away from Basildon and I took my final course in April 2008.

I now co-write articles for the Classic Tractor magazine and do part time work training on basic computer skills in the local library.

Otherwise I enjoy retirement with my wife and we have just been on our first cruise to the Norwegian Fjords!