Wet weather code: leave no tracks
However, as the month of June waned, and July opened up, I found my normally sunny disposition sorely tested.
The continuing bad weather has begun to wear me down, like everyone else on this island.
That said, two Saturdays ago we did at last get to cut 20 acres of silage ground that I had contracted to a neighbour.
As the crop matured, we both watched the weather forecast very closely. Phone calls were exchanged; predictions and plans were made, revised and then cast aside, as the Gods decided to send more rain.
Then, two warm and breezy days came together —Friday the 29th and Saturday the 30th — and the phone lines once again buzzed as optimism climbed, resulting in new plans.
These new plans saw me replace the nine-acre field we had started in the week before with a different field, because the original candidate was, in my opinion, still too wet to do anything constructive with.
That decision made, the mowers arrived on Friday evening, their drivers still sceptical as to the possibilities.
The one thing most farmers can tell you from years of experience of working the same ground one season after the next is the nature of a given field.
This is the type of judgment that you have to feel as much as assess. That may sound odd, how do you “feel” the nature of a field? I don’t know, to be honest, but you can. Maybe it’s a belief, maybe it’s a mystical connection, or maybe it’s a stubbornness born out of years of experience that says, “If we can just get the field opened, it’ll be all right.”
In this case, the little voice inside my head kept saying, “If we can get the first few headland swathes out of the way, and allowing that the ground falls into the near corner…”
I waved the first mower forward. The big John Deere with the auto swather mower gingerly traversed the gap and settled into the open cutting position.
Slowly the revs built up, the mower whined, and then it moved off.
I watched as the grass was spun out the back, after 30 or 40 yards, the driver increased the revs pushing both mower and tractor up into a more comfortable gear range.
We were in. Five minutes later the second mower, a standard ten-foot job, was also purring.
I walked across the cut ground between the now doubled swards. The grass was perfect, the ground was firming, and most importantly, there were no wheel tracks of any consequence. The air smelt of the month of May. A combination of the grass’s own sweet aroma combined with that earthy smell you get as the ground appears to release a long held breath. The mower men pushed on.
Their boss, Victor Cummins, arrived a little after 6pm with their tea. It was the standard fare of contractor drivers, who eat on the hoof when the pressure is on, snack boxes and Coke. We all chatted for a while before Victor collected the empty bottles and boxes, stuffed them into a bag and tossed them onto the front seat of his van.
It was only a small thing he did, and maybe it’s a trait that comes naturally to people who work the land, but in all my years, I have never met a contractor who disrespected nature or the countryside by leaving their rubbish behind.
The following morning, the self-propelled harvester arrived with seven trailers for the long draw. We quickly sorted out the traffic logistics, with full trailers having the right of way down the quarter mile of lane to the fields, while I held up the empties and directed traffic on the main road. The three fields were “wiped” in three hours, just as the clouds again began to gather.
