Chickpea Harvest

Whoever checks the dates of my posts will recognize that I was lagging behind a bit. When I was writing about the time before harvest and all the preparation we did, the actual harvest has already started!
On all 2000ha at Roundhay and 1000 ha at Tara they have been planted chickpeas, so that all the thousands of hectares are ready for harvest at about the same time.

When the headers (the drivers even said themselves that the Australian languange is screwed up in this point: whereas “header” in British or American English only refers to the front, here it means the whole combine harvester and the front is called the calm; a combine would be a combine planter) and header drivers arrived, they were, thus, looking at full weeks until all paddocks would be done!
The headers at least came with the truck, but still had to go all the way from the main farm yard, where I live, to the paddocks at Tara taking them about one hour. I also had to move the gear to the paddocks with the tractor and with a 15m 4 axle trailer I could also not go very fast and it took wide loops to go around corners because only the front axle could move.

The harvest of a big paddock – the first one was 1000ha alone! – was different from Germany. Instead of having the header come to a fixed loading point, when its box is full – if the paddock is several kilometers wide, it woukd take a long time for a header to get to the edge – the headers would empty into a chaser bin, that – as the name suggests – chases them up and drives next to them until the box is empty again. That way the headers don’t have to stop at all!

Thus, the chaser bin could fill the grain into the mother bin (the long trailer I brought up) and field bins. As it took about 30 min for the headers to fill a box, the chaser bin had always enough time to unload – or if not full to sit back and wait…
Finally to get the grains from the paddock into the silos a road train loaded from the mother bin and field bins and drove the 30 min back to the farm yard.

Here is one header and the mother bin: They might look small, but its a 12m header and a 8530 - that lets you see how big the mother bin is!

Infront of the silos we had already prepared the drive over hopper and the conveyor, as you have seen in my last blog – by the way, my weld hold the entire harvest and should work a lot more years. Into that the truck unloaded and I had to start everything up – actually a lot of gear here is PTO or hydraulic driven, as it is easier to drive along with a tractor than have miles of power cords everywhere – so I had to start the PTO for the conveyor and the hydraulics for the drive over and had to watch that first the conveyor wasn’t overworked and get bugged,  ut also that we were running on the maximum capacity. So I was always on the edge towards too much and had to shut the tailgate down a bit a couple of times.

Because the belt has already snapped once, after the 30 min to unload both trailers I was always relieved that nothing has happend.