Archived News

2nd September 2013

Having spent the morning strimming grass, I’m now enjoying the sunshine as I write this in the garden.

The last few days of harvest have at times been very stop-start.  Wednesday began quite well on the wheat at Normandy but everything came to a grinding halt at 8pm when the returns auger stopped working.  This auger sorts out any wheat that hasn’t been fully thrashed, and returns it to be re-thrashed.  If the flighting, or spiral is damaged in any way it becomes clogged up and will stop turning. This was not something that could be fixed quickly in the dark.

Laurence returned on Thursday morning with Dale from Auto Agritech to dismantle the combine harvester, to access and repair the auger.

The flighting appeared to have been damaged by a flint last season on its previous farm; the damaged metal had weakened over time and became increasingly thinner, until it was unable to push the grain back any longer. This auger is so far inside the combine that the weakened metal would not have been visible.

With the auger removed from the combine, Dale cut out the damaged section of the flighting and welded on a new piece of metal. 

With the combine rolling again, Normandy was completed on Thursday night.

Laurence drove the combine harvester to Dunsfold very early on Friday to avoid other road users.

Apart from the combine, it takes about three hours to get the other equipment in place before harvesting can begin in the new location; an hour to drive an empty grain trailer from Wotton and a two hour round trip from Dunsfold to Normandy to collect the header (the combine harvester’s cutter bar) by which time the dew has dried off the crop.

We harvest crops in many areas because there isn’t a large block of arable land such as you see in other areas of the UK, so with mixed land use and smaller fields we must spread our farming and our costs over the smaller fields which are more spread out.

Friday went quite well with 70 acres of wheat harvested between1-10pm but Saturday was quite a different story, with three breakdowns!

It began as Laurence tried to engage the threshing unit which was working just fine the previous evening, it jammed and took two hours to find and solve the problem; a piece of wood stuck in the drum which Frank had to climb in to remove.  The wood must have reached that point the night before, just as the engine was switched off!

Harvest got going at 11.30am but was halted again at 1pm; this time by a large rock jamming up the elevator!

The header was removed to gain access and extricate the rock, but it took twenty minutes to replace the header, probably due to the way it had set down onto the ground.

Finally Laurence was underway, but after just 90 minutes of work, a knife on the header snapped and the combine was down for another hour whilst he replaced the broken knife.

I’m glad to say that between 4-10pm things ran a lot more smoothly and we looked forward to progress on Sunday! 

Spoke too soon! Two relatively short delays; the police closed the road near Cranleigh due to an accident and we couldn’t get trailers back to the field for half an hour; without an empty trailer the combine had to sit and wait with a full tank of grain.

The final stoppage of the week came yesterday evening when the belt drive to the chaff spreader snapped. This was a complicated  breakdown due to all the pulleys involved, so  it made sense to call Southern Harvesters and with their expertise they could get the job done quickly; it also gave Laurence chance to have a cup of tea and a hot meal before getting back to finish the field last night.

While Laurence is focussed on harvesting it helps enormously to have a good team of men and women on the farm all mucking in with a variety of jobs.

Donald has been feeding the ‘fat’ cattle and straw carting. The straw continues to be shifted from the fields back to various barns for storage in readiness for when the Friesian x cattle are brought in for over-wintering.

Amanda is feeding about 50 young calves all on milk; she sorted 9 fat cattle that went to slaughter on Friday and 16 that go this week.

Ed is now cultivating at Dunsfold after completing the last of the oilseed rape drilling at Shalford. The rape at Manor is well up and we just need to keep the pigeons and slugs off this year.

David has been working on the harvest and is now dealing with slug activity at Upfolds where the slippery creatures are chomping the autumn oilseed rape which is already up.

We mustn’t forget the good mix of extra harvest help: Charlie, Raymond, Edward, Duncan and Frank!