Archived News

24th July 2011

The combine harvester has been cleaned by four of the car wash crew from town and they’ve made a pretty good job of it in 18 man hours!

The combine is washed under the side panels, in all the nooks and crannies and then over 50 points are greased up.

Laurence doing a the last few jobs before harvest can begin.

David makes sure the drier is ready

Rain has delayed the start of harvest 2011 by a week, but we finally got underway on Friday with a 12 acre field of oilseed rape at Park Farm.

As Laurence made the first pass around the field he noticed rape seed spewing out from a hole where there should have been a meter attached.  On phoning the CLAAS servicing team, they said that the part was on order but they hadn’t expected the combine to be needed yet!

Laurence isn’t sure how much grain was lost, but as a stop-gap he managed to block the hole with pages out of the combine service book and some links of chain!  A replacement part arrived on Saturday but it’s still not working; it’s meant to measure the yield per acre.

Just as the first field was finished, the heavens opened and harvest stopped for the night.

Beaky is now three weeks old and has grown enormously in such a short space of time. 

He/she enjoys swimming, either in the bath or outside in a tub and has today progressed to a swimming pool. 

I couldn’t gain enough distance to take photographs as Beaky followed me wherever I went.

Three more eggs have been set in the incubator so we hope to have a little more success next time and produce some brothers or sisters for Beaky.