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Right. Good morning MyFarmers. Today could be a very exciting day… it could be a disaster.
This wheat is ready, or it’s as ready as it’s going to be. What we need now is it
to be dry so we can put it in the store. We had a shower of rain last night. That seems
to have blown away, and as long as it doesn’t rain this morning, it will be fit to combine
after lunch. Our contractor who does the combining is free. He can come and do it, so I’ve
provisionally told him to get the machines down here, so we’ll just have to see what
happens with the weather.
What I’m looking for is, in a ripe crop, the crop’s ripe now pretty well generally.
We sprayed this with Round-Up about 10 days ago, 11 days ago, and that was to help kill
it off. We’re up on Valley Farm, and this is where we need to get our oil seed ***
drilled, and it’s important to get that *** in by the end of August, first week of
September, so this was where we had to concentrate. That’s why I sprayed it off with Round-Up.
It will kill it off, kill all the green, and help it to, you know, finally ripen.
So we’ve got a crop now that’s looking pretty good. What I need to be able to combine
is this grain to be down to about 18% moisture, 19 at the outside. Ideally we’d put it into
the store at 15, then we wouldn’t have to do anything with it except just to keep it
cool. But at 18 we’ve got a degree of work to do with the fans and the driers at the
farm, but we can do that, and it’s going to be one of those years where we just have
to take what we can when we can. I keep looking over there because there are some black clouds
coming now. We just don’t know. They forecast heavy rain for tomorrow. Today might be the
only chance to get this, this week. So we’ll have to see.
It’s about…well that (laughs)…I’m saying this with a little bit of knowledge.
Normally when you bite into grain, you can’t bite it. It’s down to about 14%, 15% moisture.
If you can bite through it reasonably easily it’s 19, 20. This is getting quite hard
now, so it is drying this morning. We had the contractor up earlier on with his moisture
meter and it was averaging 19, odd spots up to 20. Now, it’s only half past 10. In about
two hours’ time it should have lost another percentage, so it should be just about right,
so we hope we can go. I suppose we’ll see what happens. I’ll get Rob up with the camera
and do a bit of filming if we can go, and you’ll see tomorrow.
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