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''.