This piece is an extract from our Forestry Features newsletter, which is emailed out at 4PM every Wednesday with a round-up of the week's top stories.
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THE first thing you notice is just how sturdy the LF8 is. This is not a machine of cheap metals and plastics, put together for as low a cost as possible. Instead, it feels rugged, robust, like you could send it out to anywhere and in any type of weather and it wouldn’t break sweat.
During our short time in the woods, the narrow forwarder made light work of snaking in between pockets of tree cover, barely flinching when the terrain dipped unexpectedly or it found stumps in its way.
WANT MORE ON THIS STORY?
- READ: LF8: First look at Farma's 8.5-tonne forestry forwarder
- WATCH: First look at Farma's new LF8 forwarder in action
But another quality that stands out is just how little footprint the LF8 appears to leave. On the week of the launch event, Estonia had been hit by biblical amounts of rain. Yet the trail the 8.5-tonne machine left in its wake could easily have been that of a forwarder around the five-tonne mark.
That’s not to say the woodland looked untouched – this is, after all, still a large machine – but at a time when impact is a growing concern, it was in a far better state than it could have been.
All in all, the LF8 holds promise and impressed the press pack. But its real test – with pro operators – is still ahead.
Keep an eye out for October's edition of Forestry Journal for a full feature on the launch event, and to find out more about the LF8.
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