Not much time for posting in the last few days sorry. Typical work day at harvest starts at 7am and finishes around midnight. Some days I have to spend a bit of time in the office doing grain pricing, organising logisitics etc and when that happens I quickly sneak a few photos on to the blog. The last few days however have all been out in the field dealing with the multiude of unexpected events that always get thrown up arond so many pieces of big machinery operating. I have been taking plenty of photos though and will get some on soon say stay tuned. Three days in a row of 40 degree weather and three more to follow have meant that all the grain is ready and we are on track for one of our earliest finishes to harvest ever. We move to some bread wheat today before finishing the wheat with a couple more days of durum. Two or three days of chickpeas will wind every thing up by early next week if everything goes to plan. Yields have been all over the place this year with some paddocks being well above our long term average and some well below. A lot of analysis will be needed when it is all over to try and work out what has been going on.

The photo below was taken from the top of our elevator tower yesterday. This block did not yield nearly as well as I had hoped.

Below is a picture of what takes up most of my time during harvest. Dealing with the unexpected things that continually crop up. Here I am fixing an auger that takes grain out of the road delivery pit at our silos. Matt Crumbley (in the disco singlet) who has been working with us for about 4 years now is helping me.

Taken this morning from the top of the elevator tower while everything was being made ready for the day ahead.

Very busy last couple of days getting well into harvest rhythm now. We are gradually filling out own storage system and have started to deliver some wheat into Graincorp at Curlewis to make more room. The Durum is yielding quite well although also quite variably. Some of the blocks I expected to be very good have been considerably under the average so far. I have a feeling that we may have had more frost damage than first realised as it seems to be directly correlated to elevation.

Was able to take some nice photos this evening as the three headers lined up to open up a new block. The picures were taken from on top of the hill behind Pine Cliff and I must say that as I stood there with a nice cool breeze watching the sun go down and the and the headers move through the crop I had a real "why would you do any thing else" moment.

In the photo below you can see the dust trailing from the headers towards our silo complex. The hill in the background is Mullaley Mountain.

This morning we had a frustrating problem with our header. It started yesterday when the oil pressure sensor and throttle started playing up. When we tried to go this moring the alternator was charging but nt putting charge into the system. After four hours tracing wires and with the help of Cummins from Tamworth, Gordon finally located a burnt wire in an earth circuit. Fixing that fixed all the sensor and other issues we were having late yesterday and have been going well since. Gordon Crumbley has been working with us for about 5 years now and used to be an autoelectrician. He is fantastic to have around for this sort of thing.

Warrens second header turning up this afternoon. We will be running three headers from now until the end of harvest. Hot temperatures the last couple of days and the same forecast for the next week or so has brought all of the crop in a lot sooner than expected. We have gone from over 14% moisture to 9% in four days and so ther is no reason not to get extra help and get it all in as quickly as possible.

Very very dusty this year.

We started with a second header today. Warren Kelly has been helping us out for 7 or 8 years now. Just dashed in to post these photos but should have some more time tomorrow to give a bit more detail about everything that is happening.