Month: August 2017

I thought I’d start this week with a picture of us actually combining something. Progress is being made, and all my indicators and benchmarks point to the fact that we are now half way through harvest. As a rough rule of thumb, harvest takes about 8 weeks from start to finish, so time wise we are half way. The total are to be harvested is now slightly less than the area we have cut, so that makes us just over half way. Finally, the combine has successfully cut round 3 out of the 5 pylons in fields growing combinable crops. This guide is not as accurate this year, and I would imagine by the time I am writing the next update there will be no pylons left to cut round.

Weather wise, things were so-so. We got combining on Monday afternoon, Wednesday afternoon, and again on Saturday and Sunday. Friday was a washout, which meant that although we were cutting on Saturday the grain was very wet, so has taken a bit of drying. The general theme of the year continued, with lots of little bits of rain which stopped us cutting without there being a deluge.

We had to call on Stuart Millar from Sellars this week. Stuart has looked after our combines for a number of years, and I’m sure his heart sinks every time he sees my number when his phone rings.

When I was putting on the straw chopper I noticed drips of oil down the side of the combine. He suspected that the hydraulic oil cooler was cracked, which is not good. However, he cleaned things up, tightened up a couple of hose clips, and things appeared to get better. He left me with instructions to keep an eye on things.

Another problem we are having this year is brackling in the barley.

Brackling is when the stem breaks over half way up when the crop is ripe. This means that instead of the head being held up in the air, it is hanging inches off the ground. When the combine cutter bar cuts the straw, the head drops on the ground, rather than go in the combine.

We try to help the situation by fitting lifters to the front of the cutter bar, which lifts the heads up a bit. It does help, but if the brackling is really bad, then there isn’t much else you can do.

 

 

On a brighter note, all the samples of Laureate spring barley have made malting standards this year. We sell our malting barley to East Of Scotland Farmers, and they have uplifted 4 lorry loads this week. It is the usual story though, that every farmer in the country has malting barley to be moved, so you cannot always get lorries in when you need them. We have successfully juggled our shed space so far this year, but things could get interesting next week when we start cutting a different variety.

In summary I have to say that we now at least feel as though we are getting somewhere. The forecast is good for the next week, and we have a few fields ready to harvest, so by the next update I am hoping to report good progress.

 

Well, it is just as well us farmers are by nature uncomplaining cheery chappies! The photo below shows the closest I got to harvest for most of the week – and even then it was raining!

The weather was again against us, but as a consolation there wasn’t really that much ready. We had one field of what was supposed to be winter barley to cut, which I duly did on Thursday, but it didn’t take long. We always seem to have one disaster, and this field was it. Basically the weed control was less than adequate, and the field was taken over by a grass weed called sterile brome. It had swamped out pretty much all the barley. To make matters worse, I had a breakdown on the combine when the knife bar broke.

As can be seen from the bottom picture, it has been going for some time. You can see a small area of silver at the top left corner. That is the fresh break, the rest of the break is rusted, meaning that it has been exposed to air, and is therefore older.

It didn’t take too long to fix, and I was up and running again within an hour.

Thankfully on Saturday the sun appeared, and a good drying wind got going. We were able to make a start to the spring barley in the afternoon after getting the dryer cleared of the last of the winter barley.

The spring barley has to be kept separate as it is destined (hopefully) for the malting market. Also, I disabled the straw chopper on the combine, as we are selling the straw to a neighbour, who arrived with his baler on Sunday.

Other developments included the dryer being fixed – many thanks to Charlie Pryde for coming out on Monday and putting things right. All 3 burners have worked perfectly since then. Finally we lost our ‘trainee farmer’ this week when Cameron went back to school on Wednesday. Hopefully he’ll still be happy to help us out at weekends.

Well, that has certainly been some week! I think we’ve about had it all. Rain, sun, breakdowns… We’re only 2 weeks in to harvest and I’m shattered already.

We’ll start with the weather. The forecast was (generally speaking) right, in that it was a much better week. Consequently we managed to get on well with harvest, almost finishing the winter barley by Sunday evening.

Grain moistures also dropped significantly, starting off the week at over 23%, and by about Friday, this had fallen to around 16%. To store grain safely, it needs to be dried below 15% moisture content, so getting it cut reasonably dry saves a bit of money in drying costs. There was, however, some really beefy showers, and it is shaping up to be a wet(ish) harvest – when a cloud passes over you, you get wet.

It also means that getting about the fields can become a problem, as the picture shows. At this stage we are just worried about getting the crop off, but tracks like this can cause problems when it comes to establishing the next crop.

Breakdowns. We’ve had our fair share of these already, but thankfully nothing so far that has been a show stopper. The combine picked up a stone one evening. Combine harvesters do not like stones at all. Thanks to a rapid reaction from the driver, serious damage was avoided, but we lost 4 retractable fingers, at least one of which went right through the combine, breaking straw chopper blades on the way out. On Saturday morning we decided we would attempt to repair the broken blades, and according to the instruction manual it was a simple process of ‘remove plate from side of combine, remove pin and holding rod, replace blades through slot, reinsert rod and pin.’ Being a farmer you have to be a jack of all trades, but one skill is to know when to stop. We got as far as ‘remove pin and holding rod ‘, and couldn’t find the pin. We noticed at the same time that the rod in question had a bit of a bow, which would mean it could be difficult to remove, and even more difficult to put back in. We decided to quit while we were ahead, so the straw chopper will not be chopping so finely for the rest of the season, and Sellars can fix things properly when the combine goes in for its winter service.

The other breakdown we had was at the grain dryer. There are 3 diesel fired burners, but we only really use 2 as we don’t dry at high temperatures. Despite them all being service before harvest, 1 decided not to work at all, 1 decided to only start after the dryer had been running for about 20 minutes, and the other 1 sometimes started first time, sometimes not. So once you got it going in the morning, you hoped you didn’t have to stop it until either the wet bin was empty, or you were shutting it down for the night. Getting hold of an engineer to help us was a challenge, so we have nursed it through the week. Hopefully someone is coming on Monday afternoon to fix things for us.

However, when things were going, we got on really well. I’ll finish with a picture of the combine cutting winter barley with Clatto wind turbine in the background.