David Cooper on Harvest time

But I’ll just go back to the harvest. It’s all done now by combine harvester and so one man can do it; he can get up on the machine, he can drive across a field and so there’s no dust. There might be a bit of dust but he doesn’t have to sweat or anything like that.

The corn, the grain is usually pumped into a trailer which is driven alongside. Sometimes it goes into bags and can be handled easily but it’s less labour-intensive so you save all those wages through having modern machinery, so that’s what I was going to say.

Less jobs, yes less jobs and less men involved and less wages and also the farms are bigger because a combine harvester costs I don’t know how many thousands of pounds so you wouldn’t buy it just for a small 350 acre farm. A lot of them amalgamate now so, this farm for instance, is farmed.

The farmyard is empty, it’s going to be developed I think for holiday flats or something, holiday homes, but the fields are still there and so some other farmer from the area takes over that farm and another farm and just rents the fields, because they’ve got the machinery to do it.

They’ve got a combine harvester, they’ve got balers and so on, and so two or three men can make a good living, or a better living than probably 20 men would have done in the past but that’s how life was wasn’t it?

It was slower, more people involved and not everyone wants to work on a farm nowadays.