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. 

Bourne lies on the edge of the Lincolnshire corn belt and for those who like to drive out and enjoy our rural landscape in late July and August, there are huge swathes that have that look and smell of high summer from years past and one only has to stop and sit for a moment at the cornfield's edge to conjure up scenes from Cider with Rosie, the evocation of this period remembered by the author Laurie Lee, because harvest time may be the peak of modern agricultural production but it is also at the very heart of our English countryside, the fruition of a year's labour and an indication that the land is giving up its generous bounty. 

Green corn near Wilsford, south of Bourne (above), and near Bourne in 2005 with crop spraying underway (below).

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. 

In spring we see the shoots of the new plants pushing through the soil and by June the corn is green and knee high, a wonderful sight under a changing fenland sky of sun and cloud. By early August we hear the hum of the combines in the fields and not a minute of fine weather must be wasted and so once they start up at mid-morning, they continue operating until late into the evening and often through the night with powerful headlights showing the way. These machines are mighty and costly pieces of equipment, 450 horse power and a price tag of £165,000, but with a blade sweep of 22 feet, they devour the crop at the rate of five acres an hour, a phenomenal achievement compared to the methods of past times when the pattern of the harvest was dictated by the need to preserve the grain in the ear until threshing time. 

The modern, self-propelled combine harvester is farm mechanisation at its most efficient. It incorporates a threshing drum to separate the grain from the chaff and so cuts and threshes in one operation, throwing the chaff out at the rear and making periodic stops to offload its yield into a waiting trailer, hauled into a convenient position by tractor. It uses the latest developments in technology, a computer panel to control the machine's performance and radiophone communications to keep the combine in touch with the tractor driver and even the farmer back at base.

A combine cutting a wheat crop on the outskirts of Dyke, near Bourne

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.

 
After the harvest - big bales at Morton, north of Bourne

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. 

MORE HARVEST PICTURES

Modern machinery equipped with powerful lights now enables farmers carry on harvesting after dark to take advantage of the fine weather, as seen here at Hanthorpe, near Bourne, in August 2013.

ALL IS SAFELY GATHERED IN

See also

Out with the combines     Hay and straw bales     Bringing in the harvest

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