Farmer Focus: Harvest under way with new combine

I love harvest, or at least when it is going well. I love the anticipation of the new crop, the camaraderie of the team working together, the machinery and seeing the culmination of a year’s work.

We have made a solid start, with half the ryegrass and most of the peas done at time of writing. A monster traffic jam is looming for the next two weeks with cereals to come off at the same time as the completion of late grasses.

See also: Somerset grower wins gold with precise wheat production

We spent the growing season on the cusp of being too dry, but picked up very timely rains that never saw the irrigation system tested. We have been fortunate here inland, as coastal areas and south of here have been perishingly dry.

This year, we had the added excitement of a new combine arriving, albeit a bit late due to the topsy-turvy world of Covid.

I made the decision to order it just as we began the first lockdown in late March, with the logic that replacement was kind of scheduled – we didn’t know how supply lines might be impacted and most importantly didn’t know just how far our currency might fall.

On that count I got it wrong, as it appears the US and Europe can outbid us in the quantitative easing stakes and have bigger money printing presses.

So, I haven’t been entirely sure that I made the correct decision. But I must say it is not very often that you take a new machine out of the box and it performs significantly better than expectation and certainly well beyond what I would have presumed reading the brochure.

On paper we swapped like for like, however we have been amazed at the progress a manufacturer can make in six years from what was already a very good machine.

This has all got me thinking yet again that the general public have no idea of the level of investment, design, technology, or skill that goes into producing the food that they so conveniently find on the supermarket shelves.