Steve Heard: Machinery dealers do the near impossible amidst clouds of dust

While trying to push hard to finish combining on a Sunday evening and having been told that you can’t bung a rotary combine in beans….I did!

Expecting an early supper I made a call on the off chance and was thus delivered a new belt, only a smallish detour for the service manager on his way home but much appreciated, thank you Paul.

On a similar note, a special thanks to Martin from Stocks Ag who at 10.30pm on a Saturday evening managed, via phone, to recognise my incompetence with digital weigh scales and thus recalibrate our seeder.

While I try to embrace new technology, the pace at which it is advancing sometimes scares me

Steve Heard

While I try to embrace new technology, the pace at which it is advancing sometimes scares me. A recent call for advice on some input settings for one of our GPS steering systems had me sat in my tractor while Graham, from his office in Scotland remotely configured my system as I watched.

He then continued to monitor my performance advising me to avoid the trees I was approaching as he plotted me on Google Earth!

To drill or not to drill, that is very much the locally debated question with such arid conditions for us. We started wheat drilling on the 12th and finished up all our own by the 20th.

I believe this year we have benefited from our cultivation policy, running our Sumos with large straight discs before the subsoil legs has helped reduce any clod busting to the surface, and the relatively small close spaced following discs work a lovely shallow fine seedbed.

So rightly or wrongly, with seedbeds in such good fettle we have pushed on and certainly so far I have no regrets.

We now concentrate on drilling our oats, and again the sprayed off stale seedbeds look too tempting to leave and so clouds of dust continue from dusk to dawn.

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