HAD Peter Surman turned up with his straw spreader at Glastonbury last weekend, it would no doubt have gone down as one of the top acts of the festival.

Maybe not quite on a par with The Wurzels' Brand New Combine Harvester all those years ago, but a smash hit nonetheless.

As it was, this innovative piece of agricultural kit was doing the business at Upton Jazz Festival instead.

Both gatherings of the musical clan, the one beside the banks of the River Severn in South Worcestershire and the other spread across a dairy farm in Somerset, suffered from the weather, which resulted in copious amounts of mud. Rather more in the West Country than Worcestershire, it has to be said.

And where you have mud, it pays to have some means of mopping it up.

That's where the jazz festival organisers scored, because they were able to call in Peter's machine, which lays down straw at least twice as fast as can be done by hand and much more effectively.

Putting down straw is one of the basic tasks of farming. Somewhere along there with shifting slurry or filling the feed racks.

So it's rather surprising that a device to do it automatically didn't hit the market until around 10 years ago.

Peter Surman bought one of the second generation' straw spreaders three years ago and uses it on his riverside farm at Upton, which hosts the majority of the jazz festival, for strawing his cattle yards.

"I should think we put down around 3,000 large bales a year in the yards," he said. "It's a great time-saver. This is because it shreds the bales rather than chops them, you get less dust, which is ideal when you have a lot of people about."

The amount he spread to make life easier for the high-steppers and banjo pluckers of the jazz world was rather more modest, around 52 bales. But considering each one weighed 300 kilos - or six hundredweights in old money (that's six of those sacks the coalman used to carry up your garden path) - that would still have been a massive amount to put down by hand.

A rough count on the fingers makes it the best part of 1,000 small bales of straw.

The self-loading straw spreader, which is British made, fits on the front end of a tractor and, although it costs a relatively modest 7,000, isn't any use without the tractor, which adds about another 40,000-plus to the operating total.

The jazz festival occupies about 70 acres of Peter Surman's Ryall Court Farm and, while straw obviously didn't have to be scattered across the whole site, it was needed to blot up the wet on the car parks and especially on the walkways around the stalls and marquees.

After a weekend of revelry, the last vehicle left the ground at 2pm on Monday, which was rather more rapid than they departed the bog of Glastonbury.

Organiser Alan Buckley said: "The ability to spread straw so quickly kept conditions manageable and played a significant part in the tremendous success of the festival.

"It was a great machine. I've never seen one like that before."