A Serene Agricultural Video

[Jerry_Atrick]

This video was taken by a young lad that lives in the next village from me. I met him and his family while I was walking my dog in a field of Rapeseed at the back of my place - a really pleasant young fella who is is respectful with the use of his drone. His whole family were absolutely charming, to be honest - world needs more of them and less of the dysfunctional ones.

 

Anyway, enjoy the harvesting. Note, the solar farm - that is the one I was writing about where the height of the panels above the ground is at least 1m at the shortest, rising to about 1.4m to the highest.

 

(and please watch the vid on youtoob and if  you like it, click the like button.. he deserves it)

 

 

 

 

[edit] I have bloody well had to give way or back up to the next cutout to the bloody tractor too many times on our 1.5 car wide country lanes

 

Edited October 15, 2022 by Jerry_Atrick

[Yenn]

 A far cry from my days harvesting in England. First a man went round the perimeter of the field with a scythe and somebody collected and tied the grain into sheaves, then the binder came in and was towed round by horses or a tractor. That resulted in many sheaves tied with binder twine which we had to stook, that is stand in groups, two wide by 6 or more long to allow the grain to safely dry before we pitched it onto trailers with a pitch fork, then onto a stack where it would wait till winter and the threshing machine pulled by a steam traction engine would set up and thresh the grain out and also bale the straw with wire. Happy days, but I doubt many would want to do that now.

[Old Koreelah]

12 hours ago, Jerry_Atrick said:

This video was taken by a young lad that lives in the next village from me…

 

Looks like a wonderful harvest. Australian farmers tell me they cannot approach the yields achieved across northern Europe, because of of their fertile soils and looong summer days.

 

Last month we spent a couple of days driving across southern England. Beautiful country. Wish our farmers would adopt some of their land management practices. Wildlife corridors and refuges around every paddock, providing windbreaks to reduce wind erosion and evaporation. Too often I’ve heard farmers complain that trees get in the way of their machinery!
 

That doesn’t seem to have bothered the French. Normandy farmland is similar to England, with small to medium sized paddock all surrounded by trees, yet some of the farm machinery is a big as you’d see in the wide open farmland of Australia.

[facthunter]

Be better to be contracted out like in the USA They follow the weather north. Why own  machinery you use once a year?.  Makes no sense. Nev

[Yenn]

Isn't that what happens in Aus. The harvest it starting in Central Qld . now and the machinery will work its way down to Victoria by about Christmas time.

[facthunter]

Not very organised to my knowledge. Not the scale of the US either.  Nev

[Old Koreelah]

On 16/10/2022 at 5:01 PM, Yenn said:

 A far cry from my days harvesting in England. First a man went round the perimeter of the field with a scythe and somebody collected and tied the grain into sheaves, then the binder came in and was towed round by horses or a tractor. That resulted in many sheaves tied with binder twine which we had to stook, that is stand in groups, two wide by 6 or more long to allow the grain to safely dry before we pitched it onto trailers with a pitch fork, then onto a stack where it would wait till winter and the threshing machine pulled by a steam traction engine would set up and thresh the grain out and also bale the straw with wire. Happy days, but I doubt many would want to do that now.

Yenn you are part of a breed we are rapidly losing: a generation that started with horses and ended up with robots!

I hope you’ve had plenty of opportunities to tell your stories to young’uns. Have you recorded your memories for posterity?

[willedoo]

I came along a lot later. We had an Oliver self propelled header, which by today's standards, was fairly primitive. It had a petrol engine and no cab, just a big umbrella and later a fibreglass shade roof. An open cab, that's why I get itchy just watching the video Jerry posted in the OP.

 

I can still just remember pre bulk days when all the wheat was put in to sewn bags. Someone might know, were they three bushel bags? The header had a grain bin like headers today. The auger wasn't hydraulic; it had a bolted hinge point so that it was either in extended harvesting position or folded for traveling or storage. That bin would empty into the trucks which didn't have tipping hoists. The truck bins had hatches down each side and a large inverted V section in the bin to gravity feed the grain out the hatches. The bags were hooked on to the outside of the hatches, filled, then sewn up and stacked together. From there, they were loaded via a bag elevator on to a flatbed truck and trucked to the rail depot. It was a lot of muscle work. Some people tried side delivering into the trucks while harvesting, but it caused too many fires started by trash build up around the truck exhaust system.

 

After that, the local bulk grain silos were built, so the trucks could drive there, park over the metal grate and open up all the side hatches to unload. We eventually traded in the two A frame bin trucks on a second hand AA-160 International with a tipper hoist. That was pretty flash in it's day. We also had a late 40's M series Bedford tipper of about four ton capacity. It wasn't a bad old truck, even though a bit slow.

 

When they were building one of the silos, I got a job with the  building contractors. It was good money for a sixteen year old. The silo was a group of four built together as one. Concrete trucks would dump into a hopper which was hauled up an elevator to the forming platform on top. From there, labourers would wheelbarrow the concrete to the mould ring running around the edge, while others worked the hand held agitators. My job was to trowel the inside of the silo to get a smooth surface. A scaffold was suspended from the platform above, and all night I would just keep working my way round in circles rendering the inside surface. WHS was atrocious back then. The scaffold was two planks wide, wet and slippery from the concrete leakage from above, and the guard rail was made from wooden tomato stakes Cobb and Co'd together with thin tie wire. I nearly went over once when the construction was about eighty feet up, luckily the tomato stakes held.

 

Edited October 17, 2022 by willedoo

[onetrack]

Here ya go, this even beats Yenns good farming memories. The Qld Govt commissioned moving film of farming activities in Oct 1898, utilising a static Lumiere Cinematographe (and I never even knew there was movie film, prior to WW1).

 

This short clip from 1899 shows a wheat harvesting operation in Qld, utilising a horse drawn Buckeye brand reaper and binder that is harvesting the wheat crop, while labourers stack the wheat sheaves. 

 

https://aso.gov.au/titles/historical/wheat-harvesting/clip1/

[Old Koreelah]

47 minutes ago, willedoo said:

When they were building one of the silos, I got a job with the  building contractors. It was good money for a sixteen year old. The silo was a group of four built together as one…

So Willie, I can blame you for building all those death traps! Like you describe, our local silo is four in a bundle, with a one-man, handcranked elevator installed in the centre. I suspect it’s the only way to get to the top and our VRA has used it for rescue exercises. My claustrophobia kicked in big time and I have no idea how we’d get to anyone trapped part-way up. 

[spacesailor]

old k

When man used horses , then steam power !.

Workers rode bicycles to work !.

Clerics rode ' old  ' trams to city offices.

Only the wealthy had ' cars ' .

& medicare wasn't here.

HANG ON !!!

Thats 2030 isn,t it. Not 1930 !!.

spacesailor

[Marty_d]

Good post Spacey.  Wondering why there were so many priests going to city offices though!