It all began when the pastoral quiet of the sunny Negev winter morning started to break with an ominous growing rumble.

In 1977, driven by my ideological aspirations, I brought my young family to Kibbutz Lahav. I had no real agricultural experience, but in my eyes, it was the ideal way to start and become a kind of farmer. Luckily for me, the kibbutz labor coordinator always had a vacancy in the irrigation department and was happy to accept a clueless volunteer from the city. After I tore up my hands in the fields hauling heavy aluminum irrigation pipes filled with water - each weighing nearly a ton - they decided to entrust me with a tractor.

First, one must understand that in the kibbutz, the real tractors were - and still are - the green and yellow John Deeres.

And so, the irrigation coordinator told me:

“Take the 20-40 (or maybe it was the 20-10 or 20-50 - hard to remember after 38 years), hitch it to a trailer full of pipes, and head down the Bermedim Road to meet us.”

He forgot to mention that the American geniuses who designed that John Deere model equipped it with electric brakes that only functioned when the engine was running.

I hitched the trailer of pipes, started the tractor, and set off on my first mission around the kibbutz yard as a tractor driver - riding with nonchalance in my blue work clothes as if I had been born a farmhand.

I parked by the kibbutz fuel pump, on a slight incline.

Behind the tractor, behind the long and heavy pipe trailer, and about twenty meters down the slope, stood two kibbutz members chatting about regular farming matters.

I turned off the engine and then:

“The pastoral quiet of the sunny Negev winter morning started to break with an ominous growing rumble.”

The tractor and trailer began to slowly roll backward, the pipes clanking as they moved.

I hit the brakes - nothing.

I yanked the handbrake - nothing.

The two men, unaware of the trailer barreling toward them, kept chatting.

In desperation, I twisted the steering wheel sharply, causing the tractor and trailer to form an angle and rub against each other.

A loud screech of twisting metal was heard (the aluminum pipes).

The trailer stopped.

The two men turned their heads and raised an eyebrow.

I exhaled.

The next day, the department head suggested I try the smaller John Deere tractor.

“Go to the nearby corn plot, hitch the tractor to a row of wheeled sprinklers, and pull them to the other end of the field. Just a straight line.”

“No problem,” I told him.

We were two in the cornfield, pulling rows of sprinklers - me and Joumas (who later joined the Knesset).

On my very first pull, I saw Joumas, usually olive-skinned, go pale.

With horror, he watched as I dragged the sprinkler line at full speed, overturning them as I went, turning them into a kind of harvester that mowed down an entire row of corn stalks, ears and all.

The next day, the labor coordinator reassigned me to the Institute for Animal Research (the official name for the pigsty at Kibbutz Lahav).

They also gave me the junkyard tractor - an old Oliver model reserved for volunteers, youth from institutions, or unskilled workers like myself.

I loved it dearly.

I drove it for nearly two years -

And caused not a single accident (!)

That very tractor is the one in the photo.

After I left the kibbutz, there was apparently no reason to keep it, so they donated it to the Tractor Museum.

Hanoch Livneh, 2015

The restoration of the tractor was funded by Baruch Goldstatt.