Last week I sprayed the final cheap and cheerful fungicide on the spring barley which has all the resemblance of a crop of Midas or Georgie we would have grown in about 1977. It’s short and thin and the ear is all of 2in long.

In common with the spring barley 40 years ago, its yield potential isn’t hectic. With just 31mm of rainfall since it was planted, it isn’t reasonable to expect a bumper crop. Like the Canadian weather this season, it’ll be Canadian-type yields.

However, the much deeper-rooted spring beans are finding water and are blooming. In the wheat, there’s some leaf rolling but prospects are good. But grass is burning up and fodder, not only straw, will be scarce.

The last of our wheaten straw has just gone but the mushroom people will face serious competition this year from dairy farmers.

Speaking of which, the summer of 1977 was also a sizzler, like the one we’re having now, but it wasn’t as hot as the two all-time-great summers which preceded it. I vividly remember combining short and thin spring barley on light land we used to have beside Trim on a very hot day in mid-August.

The combine cab had a blower but it was useless so the door was jammed open and the noisy inside was a very scratchy mix of sweat and billowing barley dust and awns on bare teenage arms.

As if that wasn’t enough, the engine temperature suddenly shot up into the red – the fan belt was in flitters.

With the torture temporarily halted, we went into Pat Leonard’s shop-cum-farm-machinery-parts-store which was where you went back then, now no more.

“The king is dead,” Pat solemnly pronounced from behind the counter piled high with bearings, bolts, combine sections and even big stuff like PTO shafts and haybob tines. The floor was little different – you had to pick your way around the King Dick tool stand, over a Lister nose pump and under the blue and red Exid crow bangers.

“What king?” said Thomas and I in unison. “Sure we don’t have a king, bar that auld relic above in the park?” (Little has changed in that regard).

“Elvis, the great Elvis Presley is dead,” said the mournful Pat. We’d never even heard of Presley. Ours was the rock music of Deep Purple, Fleetwood Mac and the brilliant Rory Gallagher. But with fake solemnity, we respectfully got the fan belt, then fitted it and resumed combining that Godforsaken crop of thin, chaffy and dusty spring barley. There’ll be more of it I fear this year but it’ll be comfortable combining with a proper cab.

MX-5 expedition

I read with interest recently about two Harper Adams engineering students, one of whom is Irish, who are driving a Mazda MX-5 to outer Mongolia to raise funds and awareness of mental health issues with farmers.

Now, setting out on a fully laden round trip of 15,000 miles in a tiny 19-year-old two-seater MX-5 is about as sensible as moving house with a punctured wheelbarrow. I’d say if Jeremy Clarkson thought of it, he’d have dismissed it as too wacky.

We drove down to the Johnstown Castle Estate in outer Wexford last Sunday in the cramped and low MX-5 and I was walking around the place like a fellow who needs to go to the toilet but can’t.

That aside, the garden and museum are well worth a visit. Nonetheless, hats off to the two plucky guys and I wish them well in their endeavours.

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