BACK IN the old days, 1000 years ago or so, it was traditional for marauding bands of Scandinavians to invade Scotland, eat and drink everything within reach, scare the women, then sail off homewards singing songs about how much fun they had just had.

So maybe Sweden’s national karma benefitted from just a little bit of payback earlier this year, when its world-renowned cultivation equipment manufacturer, Vaderstad, played host to a raiding party of farmers from Scotland’s North-east.

Of course, the motivation behind Vaderstad’s hospitality was business, specifically selling some top-of-the-market cultivators, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t also be fun, and in the process of showing the Scots invaders the workings of their company and its products, the Vaderstad team also served up a rich dose of Swedish landscape and culture.

The company has come a long way since 1960, when arable farmer Rune Stark, frustrated with having to build himself a new wooden harrow every year to replace the one knocked to bits the previous season, got out a welder and some box section steel and made himself something considerably more substantial.

Legend has it that a neighbour was shortly afterwards leaning over the fence remarking on how sturdy Rune’s new harrow looked, and wondering where he could get one just like it. Pretty soon, no-one in the area would be seen dead pulling a wooden harrow, and Rune’s farming business was on, over time, supplanted by full-time harrow manufacturing.

All of this happened near the tiny village of Vaderstad and, as is the Swedish habit, the company that emerged took on the name of its home. 50 years later, the town and the huge factory it hosts are more or less inseparable, with most of the local jobs linked to the company, and a very real sense of community spirit pervading the whole affair.

For example, in typically ‘green’ Swedish fashion, the factory and the village have a communal heating system, fuelled by a state of the art boiler that consumes round bales to produce piping hot water, which is then pumped round to everyone.

Adding to this rather homespun feel, the company is still very much in the hands of the Stark family, with Rune’s children, Cristor, Christina, Bo and Andreas, occupying the posts of development chairman, managing director, sales manager and production supervisor, respectively.

Dad is still there is spirit too, glowering oily faced from a large portrait hung in the factory reception, inscribed with his motto – which is now the company mantra – ‘Build it to last’.

But if this symbiosis of town, family and company feels a bit like a 1950s utopian experiment, the actual business end of Vaderstad is anything but quaint. They’ve got welding robots – some of the biggest currently working in Europe – and state-of-the-art 3D cutting lasers that can shape metal into previously impossible components.

The main factory’s buildings alone have 4.9 ha of floorspace, housing 450 employees, but there are a further 130 employees with subsidiary companies on premises elsewhere in Sweden. Its seven production lines currently turn out 6500 machines a year and, along with Sweden and Germany, the UK is one of its top customers.

And we get what we pay for. There are no third-country parts used on the machinery, with all the manufacturing done in Sweden, using Swedish steel. Vaderstad people’s lips do not quite curl when they discuss steel from other sources, but you can tell that they’d rather switch off the production line than turn out a single unit made of anything but their domestic best.

This pre-occupation with building things to last is something that the company sees through to its logical conclusion, as the Vaderstad spares department still offers bits for every model it has made since 1962, ready for despatch within 18 hours anywhere in Europe. It is not unusual, apparently, for 1962 models to still be on active duty.

Further proof of this fearsome obsession with quality control came when, as part of our tour, the north-east boys and I were bussed way out into the Swedish woods, to a remote spot adjoining a rock quarry.

Here we found Vaderstad employee, Markus, a young chap who had presumably drawn a short straw at some point, ‘stress testing’ the mountings on a Vaderstad Topdown 400 cultivator by dragging it over a specially created ‘rubble road’, a half mile track made entirely of rocks.

He had been doing this in four hour shifts, eight hours a day, for the previous five weeks. The noise was incredible.

“We like to build things to last,” repeated production supervisor Andreas, standing atop the cultivator as Markus took a much-needed noise break and the North-east boys poked about looking for cracks.

Back in the factory, Andreas was at pains to point out that the move to robotic welding – and cutting and painting – was in no way a sleight on the skill of the human staff. It was simply that the robots took up much less space to do the job, three times less in fact, and didn’t need to stop for lunch or toilet breaks.

The human staff would remain, working alongside the robots, supervising, and where necessary training them by manually taking them through the necessary movements.

In the main factory, commercial sensitivities prevented us from actually seeing the non-human staff at work, but later, in a visit to another site dedicated to the manufacture of the tempered discs for Vaderstad cultivators, we got a chance to witness the unceasing mechanical ballet of a droid assembly line.

I remarked to one of our party, SNP Euro-MP Alyn Smith, that it was all rather like a Terminator movie.

Factory tours and field demonstrations over and done with, the Vaderstad staff revealed that the company was just as well-equipped and professional in its provision of hospitality for visiting farmers, as we rolled into Nybble, its dedicated visitor centre, built in the classic Swedish wooden barn style.

Outside, there was an impressive line-up of the company’s historic machines, including one of the first basic harrows made by Rune Stark – and the Volvo car with which he used to tow it.

The afternoon and evening’s entertainment was all finished off, perhaps predictably, in a thoroughly raucous rendtion of Abba’s ‘Mamma-Mia’.