Reflections on 60 years of harvest ||
by Grandpa Ewan
Quite amazingly our grain crops were all harvested in good order by Saturday August 23rd. It is the earliest finish to combining in the 60 harvests I have been involved in with since leaving school and only the second time we have had everything done and dusted in August. The other was 1976 which was a famously drought-stricken year.
More typically, September is the harvest month in the east of Scotland. Spring sown barley starts to come ready in the last week in August with autumn sown wheat following on in the first ten days of September. Last year was early too. Is it climate change?
Who knows, but we deal with harvests as they come. An early one has some advantages as the days are longer and the combine can start earlier in the morning and carry on late into the evening. On the other hand yields in an early year are typically lower because the grain has had less time to fill to maximum potential.
Funnily enough, the best and worst harvests I can remember were in consecutive years. The best was in 1984, one of the first years we had started growing new varieties of wheat with very high yield potential . In 1984, we had yields of 4 tonnes per acre instead of the normal 2 tonnes and we were receiving prices similar to those we are selling now in 2025.
The next year the crops again looked great until the third week of July when the rains started. When they eventually stopped six weeks later the crops were ruined. Anyone who was involved in the 1985 non-harvest will never forget it. It was a (hopefully) once in a hundred years catastrophe.
Otherwise we have had good harvests and not so good ones in no particular order depending on the weather and the markets.
As far as changes go over my sixty harvests the most significant must be the changing ratio of people involved to machinery deployed. In 1965 we had a British-built Allis Chalmers combine with a 70hp engine, a 10 foot cutting head, no cab and the simplest of mechanical controls. Fast forward to 2025 and our German-built Claas combine has a 350hp engine, a 25 foot header, an air conditioned cab and electronic controls for every function.
Back in 1965 we still used a binder for some of the crop and that involved endless handling of sheaves, first into setting them up to dry in stooks and then loading them on to carts to take them to the stackyard. I clearly recall on one late season Sunday a team of 24 people working hard to “lead” wheat sheaves to the stack.
For the 2025 harvest, we have had my son Thomas (and his faithful collie) on the combine, New Zealander Daniel on the grain cart and me mostly in the store. It is a highly efficient process.
One thing has never changed for me though. Every year as I watch the combine finishing last pass in the last field, I feel an overwhelming mix of melancholy mixed with relief.
The most exciting period of the year is over once again but as a compensation it won’t be long until the next harvest. Will it be a 1984 or a 1985 or just somewhere in between?