The past couple of days have brought snow and a return to winter. At the start of the week I was drawing up a post as to how our preparations for spring work were going. They have now ground to a halt. The only work now being done is in the office (where it is at least warm), with the odd venture out to pull the occasional unfortunate motorist who has attempted to get up our brae without four wheel drive.
The ‘beast from the east’ has smashed a few weather station records. We have had colder days this winter, but it is the ENE wind that is the killer. The following image shows that although the actual temperature has hovered around -3.0C, the wind has made it feel a lot colder.
Weather Station Records
Unusually the wind chill has been greater than the apparent temperature. I’m not sure why this is, but think it has to do with the fact the air is quite dry at times. The relative humidity has an effect on how the temperature feels.
One thing I am glad about is that we don’t have any stock. Although we’ve not had a vast quantity of snow, it is drifting in the wind. This makes it difficult for stock farmers to feed stock in fields, and also to get the feed in to the farm. Stock kept inside are better off, but frozen water pipes are a real problem when the weather is this cold.
Before this weather arrived, neighbouring farms had started to work ground ready for vegetables, such as carrots. To get the best prices, some crops are sown as early as possible and put under plastic. This sort of weather delays things, which makes an already difficult job even harder.
It’s been a few weeks since I updated what we have been up to. It feels like a lifetime, but looking back from here, I wonder sometimes what all the fuss was about! Harvest finished on 19th September, which was just over 7 weeks from when we started, which is about bang on average. The last couple of weeks were a bit fraught though.
Breakdowns
I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that I was nursing the combine through harvest as best I could. We’d just had a fan bearing go, and the hydraulic oil cooler was leaking, but I was keeping an eye on things. The fan bearing and associated shafts, cogs, etc were all successfully replaced, and I got back to harvesting almost exactly a week after breaking down. I was cutting perhaps the steepest field on the farm, so was taking my time, and just about had it finished. While turning on the side of a hill, the hydraulic oil warning light/buzzer came on, but just briefly. I didn’t have much to do until I’d finished the bit I was on, so carried on until I’d emptied into the trailer at the side of the field. I’d been having to top up the hydraulic oil level periodically because of the leak, so I thought that was all I would have to do. However when I got to the back ladder, there were spots of hydraulic oil on it, which got more as I went up to the engine compartment. The cooler leak had got worse, so I limped my way down to a level part of the field next the gate, and gave Stuart at Sellars a phone again. 5 minutes later the rain came on anyway, so I didn’t lose out on much.
We lost a day and a half until the cooler was repaired, during which it rained. I managed to finish the field on the Friday, but what a change in ground conditions. Things had been damp on the Wednesday, but now they were wet. Getting up the hill was a real challenge.
The other major breakdown we had was at the grain dryer. Our dryer is a continuous flow dryer, which means that it is a column, where wet grain goes in at the top, and by the time it gets to the bottom it is dry. Grain is moved in to and away from the dryer by a system of elevators and conveyors – the elevator moving the grain up, and the conveyors in a horizontal direction. The elevator works by having a series of buckets fixed to a rubber belt, the grain being transported up in a bucket, and then chucked out at the top. Our elevator is a double legged elevator which is quite old. It has been on the radar for being replaced for a number of years, but due to costs, and restrictions of the building the dryer is in, we’ve not done anything. Our hand will be forced over the winter. The belt in the leg that handles the wet grain snapped.
Grain elevator with broken belt
The picture shows the result. The leg on the right is what it should look like. The left leg was the one that took the wet grain from either the pit or the wet bin, and put it in a conveyor which fed the top of the dryer. Thankfully we were able to keep going by drying the grain in batches, rather than continuous flow, and using the one leg to both empty and fill the dryer. It was a slow process, but we only had about 100 tonnes to dry at this point, so we managed.
The Weather
Away back in April I wondered if we were in for a wet harvest, as the spring had been so dry, and so it has turned out. To be fair though, it hasn’t been soaking wet (yet), but there has been some rain most days, which has meant that we never really got a good run at things. The weather station report below illustrates this clearly:
Harvest Weather Report
Harvest lasted a total of 52 days, in which only 14 had no rain at all. Yet we had less than 100mm in that time. It is not unknown for a wet month to be in excess of 120mm, so the main problem was the frequency of the rain, rather than the total amount. We were glad we finished when we did, as the good harvest days since the 19th September have been very few indeed.
Harvest Results
Looking at the broad picture it has been an average harvest. The winter barley was disappointing, coming in at 5.74 tonnes/hectare, which is below our 5 year average of 6.66 tonnes/hectare. Partly this was due to the disaster we had in one field that had a bad infestation of sterile brome (1.4 tonnes/hectare). This was our fault rather than the year, and when it is taken out the equation things don’t look quite so poor. Pretty much all the winter barley was up the hill this year, and when compared with similar spring barley, it is holding its own.
Spring barley came in at 6.38 tonnes/hectare, which is slightly above our 5 year average of 6.15 tonnes/hectare. However looking just at the average hides the quite a lot. Yields ranged from 4.02 tonnes/hectare – 7.97 tonnes/hectare, depending on what soil type and where on the farm. Also, all the higher yielding fields were growing either Concerto or Laureate, which went away for malting at a premium.
Partly because of the poor weather we chopped more straw than we normally would. It was hard enough finding good weather to cut the crop, never mind bale the straw, and we still have one field that we sold in the bout still lying there.
In Summary
I think this has been one of the hardest harvests I’ve done, though it may be that my memory is playing tricks. It is never much fun when the farmyard and fields are muddy, and you can’t get on with the work you know needs to be done. As usual I am grateful to the various companies and organisations that helped us. In no particular order: Stuart Miller and the mechanics at Sellars who kept the combine going; Jock Elliot and the drivers at Chrystal Petroleum who somehow managed to keep both the dryer and combine going in fuel even at short notice sometimes, and to Brian and David Addison who were available to help when it was most needed.
I will finish with a picture I took of the combine on the last evening just before I finished. The dogs are perhaps the only ones who are disappointed to see the end of harvest, as they get a far better view from the combine than they do the tractor!
This screen shot from the weather station pretty much describes how harvest has gone this week. As reported earlier, we cut one tankful on Sunday afternoon, and have slowly picked away at it for the rest of the week, but it hasn’t been easy.
The total amount of rain isn’t that vast (I’ve seen more than that fall in one day in the past), but it is the fact that there has been some every day. Thursday was the best day, where we cut around 30 tonnes. Yesterday (Saturday), I got 3 tonnes cut before the big showers started to hit. We had a record rain rate at about 5.30pm, but thankfully it only fell at that rate for a few seconds!
The other side effect of the poor weather is that we are chopping all the straw so far. Not much point in leaving it in the bout just for it to get soaked, and lie for a week.
The weather forecast for the coming week is better, so fingers crossed.
Same thing happens every year, and I make myself the same promises that I’ll do better for next year, only to break every last one of them. I’m talking about harvest preparations. Harvest preparations really start at the end of the previous harvest. The grain dryer needs cleaned out, the elevator boot needs cleaned out, the area around the grain pit needs swept and hoovered. Trouble is, after harvest I’m knackered, and the last thing I want to do is clear up. ‘I’ll do it later, when I’m not so busy’.
Later gets, well, later. There is the autumn sowing to be done, then we are in to winter. ‘It’s cold, I don’t want to go and clear up… I’ll do it later, when I’m not so busy’. Christmas comes and goes, and then before I know it, we are getting ready to sow the spring crops. ‘There’s too much to do, I’ll get it done when we have finished sowing, when I’m not so busy…’ You get the picture.
In my defence, this year has been a wee bit tough, and I’ve not had the time I might usually do. So if anything things were more rushed than normal. However, we have got there. Sheds are clean, elevator boot empty, dryer ready to go, combine all serviced. Just in time for the rain to come on! I managed to cut one combine tankful before the deluge this afternoon, so harvest is officially underway.
This was the front page headline on a popular farming magazine in the summer of last year. The main article was all about how the weather would be the deciding factor in world grain markets over the coming year, but on a more local scale the weather influences farming hugely. When I was a student and doing my farm practical, the farms manager said to me that all us farmers do is fine tuning. It’s the weather that makes or breaks a harvest year.So it is no surprise to find that whenever a bunch of farmers get together one topic that always gets discussed is the weather. “Weather’s a’ tae pot again, it’s been a wet spring this year”, “Aye, an’ we don’t get the frosts like we used to!” Like most things, it is amazing how your memory can play tricks on you as to what the weather was actually like a few years ago.With this in mind, I took the decision to install a weather station on the farm in late 2012. This allows me to record rainfall, temperatures, humidity and wind speed and direction. Rainfall is the most closely followed as that is usually the biggest influence on whether you can do any field work or not. So what things has it told me this year?We’ve had a very dry spring. April recorded only 4.2mm of rain. Looking back over the past 7 months, we’ve only had 220mm of rain in total. The average yearly rainfall for this area is around 650 – 700mm, so we have a bit of catching up to do. It has also been a cool spring. In many ways this has been a good thing, as crops have been slow to grow, so haven’t had a high demand for water (yet). The result of this is that generally speaking, things are looking well for the time of year, with the exception of one field of spring barley which won’t germinate until it gets a good soaking.
If you are interested in seeing what the weather is like at Cults Farm at the moment, then you can see here.
