Donald Emery on Harvest

Yeah, well the Spring, I mean, Autumn and Winter we’d be ploughing, the Spring would be cultivating and sowing. Then it was sort of fairly quiet.

Then we’d be haymaking and then harvesting and then back to ploughing and the Winter again. You know it was a fixed cycle really, plough in the Winter, sow in the Spring, make the hay in the Spring and silage ‘cos we had to make silage then too that was a new thing to us. And then your harvest time.

Initially you see it was binding and then the combines were already beginning to come into general use and then it was horse combine so you had then your harvest … when I remember the harvest as a youngster, there’d be a tractor driver, somebody riding the binder, and about four of us standing all the sheaves up.

I came over here to see my brother one time when I was in the Police Force on the Mainland and they had three blokes doing the harvest. One driving the combine, one driving the tractor running the grain back to the dryer and one on the dryer.

I couldn’t believe it! You know from hundreds of us seem to be working and it’s down to three blokes and this combine levelled itself off on the sloping ground, it levelled up.

Look at them now and it’s all done by sat nav and guided by that. It must be quite something.