Kei trucks are being used more and more on farms around the world now. Of course, in Japan, they have been a farmer’s favourite from the first moment they became available. There’s a cattle breeding farm in the “Milk Road” farming area between my house here on Mount Fuji and the Asagiri Plateau and Lake Motosu where we go for days out. Now because this farm is on both sides of the main road, the farmer has a removable cage that he puts in the load bed when he uses his mini truck to move the calves (one at a time, mind you) from one field to another via a short drive across the road.
For sheep farmers in the UK, a good used 4WD Kei truck from Japan is an ideal piece of flexible farm equipment. With a hand built cage/enclosure in the load bed you can move your small to mid-size animals around with ease. Sort of like what these folks are doing with their goats here in this Sambar Kei truck.
And a Jimny would be a real big help on the muddy tracks of Wales’ upland sheep farms. Wales, where my family comes from, is a romantic land, but sheep farming there is no cake walk. It’s more of a mud walk.
A Suzuki Jimny to back up your border collie is a good idea any day.
In fact, it seems to me that, for general agricultural use as well as for general facilities and small road maintenance, a used Japanese Kei truck is a winner purchase no matter how you look at it. In the fisheries industry the simple construction (easy to hose down load bed!) high load capacity and small size make a mini truck perfect for dockside jobs of all sorts. For large facilities like distilleries and breweries, for which to UK is so justly famous (gosh I miss proper bitters and ales; what I wouldn’t do now for a bottle of Old Speckled Hen!),
the Kei truck is the perfect all round work truck. Its four wheel drive and low gearing and small dimensions mean that it can go pretty well anywhere on any industrial site in the UK. To find out more about some of the options that make Japanese Kei trucks even more useful on the farm or at the golf course, have a quick look at Part 1 and Part 2 of our Minitruck Options series.
And, of course, from the photos of the farm Kei trucks we’ve just been looking at here, you can see that setting up an animal cage in the load bed is a modification any farmer can do himself.
A clean, used 4WD Kei truck from Japan won’t cost you a lot to buy and import, and it will certainly cover a lot of your farming, agricultural, industrial, landscaping and work site needs (golf courses especially). That’s good, yes. And even better? A Kei truck is made to be licensed as an on road vehicle, unlike the six-wheel-drive vertical tree climber sort of thing that will go anywhere……anywhere except into town to the shops or down the road to the pub for a pint of Old Specked Hen.
If you are thinking of importing a used Japanese Kei vehicle to the UK, sign up here at Japan Car Direct and we’ll show you how it’s done and we’ll set you up with a good, clean low-mileage machine that will give you years of economical fun and reliable, practical service
All of my Jimnys hit those key notes of the Kei car: They were very capable cars cost me little to run. And even when I screwed up the turbo by failing to replace the thermostat on my JA11 – entirely my fault – the replacement turbo came at a very reasonable cost. Like I said above, Kei car parts themselves are usually on the cheap side.
