The Ghost of Harvest Past (which I wrote for the Hunstanton Newsletter in 2009): Harvesting technology has progressed from the sickle and scythe stage, through horse-drawn binder and steam powered threshing drums. A binder would cut and tie into sheaves the standing wheat, to then be ‘stooked’ in the field to dry. Teams would load the sheaves onto carts and stack them in the farmyard to await the arrival of the threshing team. You knew you’d done a day’s work when forking sheaves. “When I was a lad,” growing up on the farm in Nottinghamshire, harvest was the most exciting time of the year. Even today the smell of the harvest field evokes that same heady mix of grain dust and diesel fumes, which will always remind me of former times. Harvest was without doubt also the most critical time of the year, as the product of ten months of hard work had to be gathered in in just four weeks. “What could possibly go wrong,” my father used to say – as an ironic statement of the inevitable, rather than a rhetorical question. The answer was of course anything and everything. The weather was the greatest threat to progress, followed closely by mechanical breakdowns or even fire. It is not feasible to combine cereals at a moisture content of much more than 25%; the threshing drum becomes blocked and grain separation is impaired. So little wonder then that a wet harvest can spell disaster if crops cannot be cut before the seed is shed, or worse still begins to chit (grow) in the ear. Early combine harvesters were hugely unreliable when compared to modern machines, and rarely did a day go by without some minor (or major) breakdown halting progress. It was also common for combines to catch fire, due to the fatal combination of overheating engines, dust accumulation and oil leaks. Pioneering North-West Norfolk farmer, Bill Newcome-Baker, was one of the first to import a true combine harvester in 1930, which was soon put to work on his farm at Sedgeford. The combine harvester is so called because it ‘combines’ what was the previously two separate operations of cutting and threshing – in essence a giant leap forward. Despite representing a harvesting revolution, the capacity of the early combines compared to their modern day counterparts was modest to say the least. These were tractor-drawn machines cutting a swath of no more than six or eight feet, with the grain having to be ‘bagged-off’ into giant 14 stone (88kg) sacks, to then be man-handled back to the barn (incidentally, health and safety regulations now only permit a man to carry 25kgs). In the 1950’s, self-propelled combines began to appear, still mainly imported from the USA, where the necessity to cover the vast prairies of the Mid-West had driven invention faster than in Europe. American manufacturers such as John Deere and Massey Ferguson dominated the market and their names have become as generic in the farming world as Hoover or Kleenex. Over time the output of the combine increased such that by the 1970’s farmers could boast of harvesting 100 acres a day, or around 200 tonnes of grain. The combine driver has the most prestigious job on the farm and there is a clearly defined hierarchy to establish who is qualified as relief driver at lunchtime or teatime. The days of sitting on a bare platform, exposed to the elements, choking on dust and itching from barley awns are a thing of the past. The operator now sits in an air-conditioned cab, with finger-tip electro-hydraulic controls and views the world through tinted glass windows. Latterly, computerised systems have been introduced, with on-board harvesting management and remote telemetry, beaming real-time yield information back to the farm office computer. German manufacturer Claas went one better by offering the driver an on-line fault-finding diagnostics facility, linked directly to an engineer in Germany. In the long wet harvest of 2008, while many UK farmers were still struggling to get their harvest in at all, a new world wheat harvesting record of 532 tonnes - equivalent to about 1,000,000 loaves of bread harvested in eight hours - was set on Tuesday 16 September by a rubber-tracked Claas Lexion 580TT combine working in Lincolnshire. The new record beat the previous one of 451 tonnes, set earlier that same summer by a New Holland CR9090, which was passed after just 6 hours and 43 minutes. Equipped with a 10.5 metre cutting head, the Lexion achieved an average throughput of 66 tonnes per hour over the eight-hour duration, with a recorded peak of 91 tonnes per hour at one point. It is now possible to harvest in one hour what would have taken a full 10-hour day in 1960; just one example of how agricultural productivity has increased in fifty years..........
Posted on: Wed, 23 Jul 2014 20:10:02 +0000