Wednesday, November 18, 2009

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.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

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.
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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.
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Thursday, November 12, 2009

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.
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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.

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Wednesday, November 11, 2009

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.
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

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Slowly starting to get into full swing. Bright sunny skies have brought the grain moisture down in a hurry. It has dropped nearly 4% in a couple of days and suddenly there are headers going everywhere. Not a really big day for us today due to a few power issues with the header. We had to clean out the air filter a couple of times and it took no time at all to get blocked up again. In the bottom picture you can see the amount of dark coloured dust flying out of the back of the header. This is not normal harvest dust. I think it is still left over from the terrible dust storms of a few months ago. Tomorrow we have second header turning up which should get things really moving. I will post some more on the dust storms with some pictures later.
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Monday, November 9, 2009

Got going with wheat about 4 this afternoon. We have started in a paddock of Bellaroi Durum wheat. The pictures are of the first header bin of wheat for the year and testing the moisture to get the yield monitor calibrated. Very happy with the yield so far, running around 5t/Ha however the protein is down a little. The moisture is a little high but good enough to harvest and dry down.
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Sunday, November 8, 2009


Not much action the last couple of days with light rain falling Friday and Saturday. We had 9mm total here at Pine CLiff but only 20km away there was 45mm. Not what you need on ready to harvest crops. Pictures are of me inspecting some Gregory wheat that is almost ready to go and getting the front onto the Header to get a sample of the Durum last Thursday. Sunny and breezy here today so I may be able to get a sample later this afternoon to see how close we are. The 10 day forecast has got rain next week so I am getting a bit nervous about a repeat of last year (lots of rain through the harvest period). Given that possibility if the wheat is harvestable we will geeting it at high moisture and drying it.
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Friday, November 6, 2009



No harvesting today. Persistant showers cleared up late in the afternoon resulting in a spectacular sunset and beautiful evening light. A vibrant double rainbow touching down right on the houses at Pine Cliff is hopefully an omen for a good harvest.
Finished installing the autosteer in the header and it works really well. Can't wait to get going now. Some more rain forecast for tomorrow may keep things out of the paddock for a few more days though.
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Thursday, November 5, 2009

Today Andrew Cory from NFS Ag in Gunnedah has been installing Trimble Autosteer into our header. We used to have Farmscan autosteer and this is the last piece of equipment to be changed over. Canola harvesting finished yesterday and the last load departed for Newcastle about an hour ago. A small sample of wheat was harvested and was enough to let us know that we had plenty of time to install the autosteer. If it stays hot over the weekend we will definately be harvesting early next week.
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Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Canola

The Canola was winrowed by our neighbour Rob Davidson. If you look closely on the machine you can see a coating of white. In some spots in the crop clouds of white dust came off the canola as the winrower went through. We think it was powdery mildew but whatever it was it wasn't friendly on the eyes or skin!



We have been harvesting the canola for a couple of days now and should finish tonight (Tuesday 3rd November). Yields have been O.K. I will post some stuff later on looking at how the season has gone yield wise.

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