Harvest Home

Well harvest arrived this week and was somewhat of a desperate, grabbing when you could, type of affair. Extra labour was enlisted from a neighbouring farm along with an additional combine, tractor and trailer, and the ever present engineer. These combines are so complicated and electronic – onboard computers etc, that they are constantly being tweaked and reset. Gone are the days when dad sat in the full sun, with no cab, on his little 12’ cut Massey Ferguson that I swear he almost crank started. He would come in from a day’s labour, filthy, sunburnt, exhausted but fulfilled.

Now, little brother jumps off from his air conditioned cab, with his cd player, mobile phone and walkie talkie etc, still immaculate in his RL polo shirt and shorts. He even has a mini fridge thing in the cab for his drink and sarnies!! You almost need to be a Microsoft Nerd to work one of these implements.

Mum in her day would take a picnic basket up the field with “bait” at 11.00 am; probably cheese and a hunk of bread, and possibly, shock horror, a beer!! Then back again at lunchtime, and back again at tea time, leaving a flask of tea for the afternoon. Dad thrived on tea – no cold drinks for him, he found tea much more refreshing and thirst quenching he said. Mum spent a lot of harvest baking sausage rolls, Suffolk rusks and shortcakes (pastry curranty squares) which dad dipped in his tea, and large sustaining fruit cakes.

The summer holidays were solely about harvesting. This is of course why there is traditionally such long holidays for this time of year. Children would be expected to help bring in the corn. We never, ever, had a holiday when we were children. Maybe a day trip to the seaside on a Sunday, if the work was going well.

It was just dad, mum and I until little brother was 13 and able to drive the tractor "legally"!!!. He is 5 years younger than me.

Mum drove the tractor once. I say once, meaning she took in dad's instructions on her first lesson and drove the tractor straight out of the back of the shed, taking the shed with her.

Lessons were never mentioned again.

We first had a very old combine that you had to “bag up” – when the grain tank was full, we would hold the sacks underneath a funnel, standing on a platform and fill them, only the sacks were “coomb” sacks, weighing four bushel (volumetric measure) – which is unbelieveably heavy and not in existence today. Dad could lift one on his own. I think it would take three men in this day and age to do that. Health and Safety would never endorse this anyway.


Today the combine empties straight into the grain trailers and away to storage or straight to the buyer. Sometimes the barley is sold to maltsters for beer purposes, and sometimes it is just goes for animal feed. The wheat is for flour, the rapeseed for oil, and the field beans for animal feed again. Milled at the local merchants or on neighbouring farms where they still keep pigs and have their own mill/mix plant. We do not have the right soil I am told for oats which is a pity. I am sure we grew oats when I was little.

As you can see above, no blue sunny skies and picnics on the field edge, just grey gathering clouds, dark rusty dust and all hands on deck to “gather in the harvest”.

"Yow'll all wish when the winter come,
an yow ha'ent got no bread
that for all drawlin' about so,
yow'd harder wrought instead.
For all yowr father 'arn most goo
old Skin'ems rent to pay,
An' Mister Last, the shoemaker;
so work yow hard, I pray!"

[From Gleaning time in Suffolk by John Luchinton]

Dad stands scratching his head on the headland; one can only imagine what he in thinking. I know that if we had had this type of weather when we farmed at home with his little combine he would still be cutting in October. That’s an awful lot of picnics and flasks of tea!