Archived News

30th August 2008

Sunshine in Surrey!  Probably the finest and warmest day we’ve had for harvest 2008. 

The wheat at Shalford came off at 15.5% and about 3.5 tonnes per acre which is quite good for our grade 3 land. The ground here is fairly tricky with strange boggy areas on sandy hillsides and badger sets like tank traps scattered across the field.

The machinery is inevitably under a great deal of pressure at the moment and various breakdowns are happening.   Yesterday one of the tractors had a hydraulic hose burst and later it had a puncture in one of the large tyres whilst on a hillside, so twice as hard to change. A Matrbo was also out of action for a while when the gearbox broke.

It took four hours to fix the gear box after the fire this week.  Since then the combine has been going relatively well until this evening, now the engine keeps dieing, maybe a problem with fuel to investigate.

Laurence has harvested about 500 acres of our own wheat so far.  This afternoon he moved the combine down to Brook where he will harvest 100 acres for a neighbouring farmer, before returning to our own crop at Dunsfold.  Last time I spoke to him, he had already managed to cut 15 acres so that’s a good start.