A familiar harbinger of spring is the sound of the tractor and this week's offering of archive photos highlights a few of these useful and evocative machines.

1. Michael Farrow pauses to replenish the seed box while drilling barley at Brick Farm, Drayton in 1967.

2. Old and new ways are juxtaposed in our next photo, taken at Alby in 1953. Tom Hooker is the horseman, Jimmy Crane the tractor driver.

3. Gerry Smith's 'lend-lease' tractor had been in everyday use for 49 years when he was snapped in 1990 working sugar beet at The Maltings Farm, Forncett End.

4. Our first photo is of a steam plough belonging to Mr JW Desborough getting the ground into shape on Mr HR Pruden's farm at Magdalen in 1952 – two little boys are closely observing the scene.

5. A John Deere tractor makes short work of ploughing at Keswick in 1982 – inshore gulls taking advantage of the newly-turned soil.

6. A tractor got well and truly stuck in the mud on land owned by Eccles Farms, Snetterton during the wet Spring of 1966.

7. Weybread Hall Farm is the location of our next photo: hoeing sugar beet the task in hand in May 1959.

8. Aylsham Young Farmers Club staged a ploughing marathon at Blickling in March 1969 – we photographed Peter Duffield accompanied by a flock of seagulls on the last six-hour stint of the event.

9. The arduous toil of sowing potatoes is graphically illustrated in our photo taken at Rackheath in March 1960.

10. A Fordson Dextra tractor drills a 147-acre field near Swaffham with sugar beet in March 1961.