The corn harvest For those who
are old enough, harvest time brings with it memories of a less hurried pace when heavy horses rather than horse power were a familiar sight in the fields with stooks of sheaves waiting for the threshing machine to arrive and although the combine harvester was not common in England until 1945, all is now mechanised in the cause of output and profit and the harvest from fifty acres is brought home in hours rather than the days and sometimes weeks of past times. Modern machines have given rise to a new type of farmer who has to be a technician as well as a man of the soil and although he no longer works from dawn to dusk, during harvest time at least he often works round the clock using the combine's powerful headlights to keep ahead of any change in the weather.
Lincolnshire is the country's largest producer of cereals with almost 500,000 acres devoted to wheat which produce 11.5 per cent of the national total. This output is therefore an integral part of our local economy and many jobs, farm businesses and a great deal of investment, depend on it.
The operator sitting up at the front in an elevated position like a pilot in a helicopter has a commanding view of the crop about to be cut, safe from the dust and debris thrown up by the powerful engine as the wheat stalks are scooped into the machine like a continuous carpet, a stark contrast to the farm workers of past times hacking at the corn with a sickle, binding it into sheaves, manhandling the sheaves into stooks and then threshing by hand using a flail, all back breaking work which kept them occupied for several weeks. After the cutting comes the baling and collecting of the straw, once stored in rectangular bales and then stacked for use as winter bedding for cattle who tread it into a rich manure to be spread on the land and enrich the soil but the big circular bales are becoming a more familiar sight because their shape and larger size make them a more efficient storage medium and a convenient method of transporting around the farm. All of these tasks are carried out quickly and with high-powered tractors and balers and the minimum of labour.
These modern practices have changed our countryside customs completely. Harvest was once the climax of the year, an occasion when half the village was recruited and rewarded with a supper at the farmer's expense, but it has now become a job for two or three men and their machines and within hours the land will again be under the plough. One farming year has ended and another is about to begin. The sound of the harvest in summer may give us flights of fancy about past generations who worked the land but the mechanisation and speed that we now see in the fields is an indication that agriculture has become an industry based on intensive farming practices and much of the romance that we once associated with it has gone forever and lives on only in the minds of those who once saw it as it was. See also Out with the combines
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