The best-laid plans of mice and farmers...
IN the farming community, comparing disaster stories is a frequent topic of conversation.
While you tend to tire very quickly of those whose chat consists of boasts about their crop yields and their lambing percentages, the guys who are really worth speaking to tend to concentrate on when things went wrong, rather than when they went right.
I remember many years ago, when I was but a slip of a lad, having just such a blether with a farmer who wrote a column for one of the newspapers. Giving me a glimpse into his world, he said that when things went wrong on the farm he consoled himself at least he had something to write about that week.
I tell you all this because, at the moment I’m desperately trying to take a similarly philosophical approach to writing this week’s piece – and like the old “you’ll laugh about this later” it’s not easy at the time.
One of the drawbacks of “doing a column” is that you have to write the piece a few days in advance of the paper being printed and so you’re often taking a stab at what the weather will be or what jobs you’ll be at a few days ahead.
And this week, with a few sunny days forecast for the middle of the week and only half a field left to cut, I decided to write a piece (foolishly as it turned out) about getting ready for the next job which will be sowing some of the crops for harvesting next year.
In fact, it was written up a day earlier than normal – as I was hoping to be out cutting the last of the grain on the night I normally type the column up.
However, with only one run up and a run down the field left to finish cutting the very last field of what has been a long drawnout harvest, one of the emergency warning lights on the combine started flashing and beeping loudly at me.
Tempting though it was to keep going, a frantic dash to the engine revealed that the belt which drives the cooling fan, the water pump, the alternator and a total of nine different pulleys on the combine’s engine had been thrown off.
We soon discovered that this was because a bearing had collapsed in the fan housing. And, needless to say, with a redhot engine and darkness falling, it was just too late to do much ourselves, get a mechanic out – or even to order a replacement part for delivery the next day.
To be continued…