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Fortunately, my son Max and I don’t have a lot of arguments. Max works full-time in the malting barley industry, but he is, in many ways, the real farm manager, albeit from a distance.
I’m really the understudy, but in the main we get along very well. He’s a walking computer who can tell me, for example, what crop was in a particular field seven years ago and what it yielded.
I’ve already conveniently forgotten our miserable average wheat yield for this harvest, which is great. Neither am I tempted to look it up for you or ask Max. We use Farmplan’s crop records software package, but he has all the required info in his head with ultra-quick access.
However, every year at this time, we have an argument about the simplest of things – straw. He always thinks I’m a weak seller of straw and that, in his words, I “give it away”. This is a little unjust and I don’t think those of you who know me would regard me as a particularly weak seller of anything. At least, I hope not.
Hard bargins
But this counts for nothing and I might hear from him reports of Athy straw, northward-bound, at a rip-off price of €18 for a squidgy bale, while I’m selling them, Lidl-style, at maybe €13 for a good tight bale – tops. The argument always ends the same way – I suggest to him that if he thinks he can get a better price out of Mr M, then feel free. So far, he hasn’t risen to the challenge.
But this is very much a case of history repeating itself. Likewise, my late father and I got along well, but we always clashed over two things. The first was when to close up fields for silage and the second was straw.
In the late 1970s, on a sunny September afternoon, word would trickle out to me from Dad in Delvin sales yard that so-and-so was on the way up for a back load of small square bales with a cattle lorry and trailer.
A double would carry 650 bales (or idiot bricks as we now call them), all of which had to be pitched up the ramps. We would be mad busy baling with the New Holland 276 Super Hayliner (Tanco bale sleigh in tow) and combining flat Midas spring barley with the New Holland 1540S. If we weren’t at that, we’d be replacing retracting fingers in the header auger – that was a daily ritual. There may be a return to it this year with all this tousled, low barley.
Communication
We hadn’t time to scratch ourselves – and there would be plenty of that with dusty barley straw. I’d send word back with the telegram boy that there was no chance of loading bales as we didn’t have any for him because Jimmy Payne had cleared a thousand that morning, and anyhow, we were too busy. This went down like a tonne of bricks. The telegram boy would speedily return to the field propelled by a boot up the arse.
Over the ensuing years, the straw wars became less frequent. A Tanco 21 bale squeezer arrived, which speeded up loading and was followed in due course a by Claas Rollant 62. Perhaps the biggest innovation was the advent of the Motorola mobile phone in the early 1990s which, at the very least, greatly improved communications.
The improvement in the weather over the last weekend allowed good progress to be made with harvesting the spring barley.
And you know what? With the odd poor exception, it’s actually yielding quite nicely. We’re crossing 3t/ac at low moistures, which is a very pleasant surprise as we near the end of the cereal harvest.
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