Tractor Hearing ProtectionYou should always wear hearing protection when operating a tractor. Tractors are very loud and have damaged the hearing of generations of farmers. You shouldn't let it happen to you. There are a lot of hearing protection products on the market. Earplugs are very inexpensive and work quite well. I like the earmuff-style protectors better, myself. I use 3M Model 1425 Low-Profile Ear Muffs because that's what my hardware store carries. There's not much to say about hearing protection except that you should always use it. Every time you operate the tractor without it, you do some permanent damage to your hearing. My biggest problem is finding hearing protectors when I need them. They tend to disappear when needed. My solution is to buy several more pairs than I really need, so I can always find one. (I do this with hammers and ballpoint pens, too.) Combining Music or Audiobooks With Hearing ProtectionMusic helps make the chore time go faster. I like to listen to audiobooks when using my tractor, either books on tape from the local library or digital audiobooks I download to my mp3 player from audible.com. I've been a subscriber to audible.com for four years now and have been very happy with them. You can buy hearing protection with built-in FM radio or headphones, but I roll my own. It turns out that some kinds of lightweight audio headphones, especially those from Panasonic, have removable earpieces that are just the right size to fit into earmuff-style hearing protectors such as the 3M #1425. It takes less than a minute to do the conversion, which can be undone just as quickly. It's much cheaper than fancy hearing protection with built-in radios or headphones, and this is important to me because I frequently damage the cords or leave the headphones out in the rain or otherwise wreck them. Similarly, I prefer simple tape players to fancy ones. I had a tape player fall out of my pocket once while I was mowing. A trip through a rotary mower didn't do it a bit of good. For a while I used Koss earbuds alone, since they were the stick-in-your-ear kind that did a good job of blocking outside noise. But real hearing protection is better. See my audiobooks page for more tips on using audiobooks to make chore and drive time more pleasant.
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