Silly Season

By Jonathan, December 16, 2010 9:41 pm

There’s been a fair bit happening around the farm lately, which is why not much has happened here on the blog. So I figured I’d give you an update while waiting for the next header box load of canola. We’re in the middle of ‘Silly season’. A reference that has nothing to do with Christmas and everything to do with the period of 6-8 weeks commencing at the start of windrowing and finishing at that glorious moment when the header gets parked in the shed & we all go to the beach. It’s labelled as ‘silly’ because of the hours worked. As an example, I’m into my 13th hour of work for today & will be here for a couple more yet. (By the time I got home it was 16!)
However until this week, it has been silly for another reason. If you live in eastern Australia, or make your money in the grains industry you’ll know we’ve had a lot of rain lately. We had a 2 day on 2 day off routine for the first 2 weeks of harvest, followed by the well publicised rain event a fortnight ago. That event brought our area a minimum of 2.5 inches of rain, making us relatively lucky as there were many regions that had a lot more!
How has this affected us? Well after our 8 day break from harvesting we’ve found, not surprisingly some wet paddocks. We’ve bogged trucks several times & even had near misses with the header.

Grain quality is the question that everyone has been wondering about. Test weights have been down, seemingly across the board. This means that the grain is less heavy/ dense than it was before the rain. Our canola has behaved itself and thankfully hasn’t shot (started sprouting) so it’s still of a good grade. We won’t know how the wheat, (our main crop) has gone until we start harvesting it.

There’s lots more going on that I could write about, it’s an exciting time as we seem to be hitting the rare double of good yields and good prices. Even if quality is down a bit, it should still be a great year for many in our area! But the truck is full so I gotta drive! Till next time…