WELL, we've got a start to the harvest. Three little fields of winter
barley are safely cut and enough of it is away to the merchants for me
to see that I have not got as much grain as I was expecting -- but then,
long experience has taught me not to expect as much as that.
One of my clear memories of a childhood, which is receding at an
alarming rate, is of my father and his great grieve, James Low,
considering a crop of wheat they had just harvested. They stood at the
top of the steep field which slopes south down to the River Ythan, my
father smoking one of his Player's Please and Low scraping out his pipe
and priming it with yet another fill of Bogie Roll.
They had achieved a record for the farm and, as far as they could
recall, no-one had harvested such a crop of wheat for miles around.
Normally, they wouldn't have known what the yield had been until the
spring day when all the wheat had been thrashed out of the stacks in
which they were stored all winter. But this time the stuff had been so
dry that that they had thrashed it out of the stooks. That saved an
amount of work that is almost unthinkable today. And they had got an
immediate result.
It was easy. They just had to count the bags, multiply by two and a
quarter and divide by the acres. Fifty-two hundredweights to the acre!
It was a wonder. James Presly, whose farm glowers at Little Ardo across
the valley, wouldn't be able to come down to the village for a week for
fear of bumping into us.
I remember James Low boasting to me many years later that the stooks
in that park were so tightly packed that they had to reverse the tractor
in to get the first load. The stookies made a brave sight. I remember
them well, but they were not as close as all that. It was only a
six-acre park but it was a record in its day. In the twenty or so years
that the two farmed on they never beat that yield, though many others
round them did.
So you can see why I am so desperate to get to four tonnes. Oh, I know
four tonnes is just a little short of eighty hundredweights, being not
all the same as four tons. But I think of the wonder the old men would
show when I see them hereafter and told them that I had grown four
tonnes of barley in the home field. They'd never know that a tonne isn't
as big as a ton used to be.
As a matter of fact, impressing the old men about my farming
achievements may not be easy. I know what the old grieve will say for a
start. It will be just like the time I told him that grass in Ayrshire
had made fifteen pounds an acre. He looked at me with a virulent mixture
of pity and contempt and said that if I believed that I'd believe
anything.
Yes, I may need proof and it could be tricky sneaking that through
purgatory.
But I run ahead of myself. First I must harvest the four-tonne crop.
It is not easy to estimate a crop until it is in the bank. When it is
growing it looks at its best. Combine tankfuls are a very unreliable
guide to yield but they are a bit better than the naked eye, especially
when it is a proud farmer's eye looking at a standing crop.
Two of my fields, of Pleasante the six-rowed winter barley, have
looked much my best ever raising the dreams of four tonnes once again --
maybe four-and-a-half? By the time we were counting the tankfuls it was
down just over the four. Now we have enough away to the grain merchants
to see that the Glebe is going to yield around three tonnes fifteen. And
the Home field was a bit better than that and I can dream on.
So I've got more than seventy-five cwts and the old men would be
astonished.
But I am not astonished that they grew such small crops. There is so
much more which we do nowadays to make the stuff yield. We have perhaps
five sprays and three applications of fertiliser.
We keep every fungus known to man off them, make sure the little
plants have no competition from weeds, and we spray them into thinking
they are fully grown when they are only small so that they put the rest
of their energy into making grains.
Now, when old Jimmy taught me how to grow barley he told me about
ploughing it properly and making a good seed bed. He showed me how to
put the seed in to the correct depth and how to harrow and roll.
All of that advice was right but his last words were quite wrong.
''Then shut the gate. Ye willna need it till hairst time.''
Of course, with his record winter wheat crop, he did need the gate in
the spring time to put on the two hundredweight of nitro-chalk, but
otherwise the wheat had to grow itself.
And when you look at the old men's record in that light it really was
quite a feat. For all my seventy-five cwts of barley, I wouldn't like to
try to grow fifty-two cwts of wheat with no more stimulus than two bags
of ''nitre'' -- and no more protection than that provided by irregular
attendance at church.
Young Mains is making a splendid job of the combining. I have enjoyed
the high yields but I have also enjoyed Young Mains who is unusual in
that he has a regard for the past. There is something additionally droll
about a man of his years telling the stories which are normally told by
grey beards.
He told me when he had cut our great crop in the Home field that it
was ''some contrast to the year of the short corn. In 1993 the corn was
that short they were able to strae their beets sideways''.
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