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.
