A rape seed head, with all too familiar grey skies in the background
Lone tree in a wheat field
There are five permanent staff on the farm, plus me. The farm is owned by Lord Sainsbury, former boss of Sainsbury supermarkets.
My main job during the harvest is simply to cart the grain from the header to the grain shed and drier. Basically I drove a tractor and trailer backwards and forwards all day. The challenging part is getting all the grain in the trailer and a nice even load. This isn't easy as the trailer is higher than my tractor and it is hard to know where the back is. The other bit that requires some practise is backing the trailer into the pit to tip but I got better.
Bevan getting filled up
Harvester on the place I worked at harvesting oil seed rape. You can see that the stalk is very green, this is unusual as it is normally all sprayed off to even up the ripening. However, this is destined to be used as seed for nest year's crop and spraying would ruin the germination.
Harvesting barley on a rare sunny day
We had a terrible summer weather wise and still had about 200 acres of wheat to harvest when I left. The terrible summer was capped off when the Alresford A&P how was cancelled after too much rain made the show grounds a bog. We had a few visitors that weekend though, Kelley, Nicola, Clare and her sister Jessica all came down and we had a great time, capped off with a Hawaiian Young Farmer's party in a barn which we all got in theme for - fortunately I have no photos of it....
