Farming the Land in the Autumn Time Volume 2

DVD PAL

While visiting Australia to film the
2013/14 wheat Harvest at Miralwyn, we
met up with a team of workers from
Miralwyn cotton.

They were getting ready to cut 10,000
hectares between Walgett and
Brewarrina. Under farm manager John
Ellis, they had a fine team in place
with some of the latest modern
machinery, which included six big Claas
combines, three chaser bins and the big
mother bins that sit along the
headlands to store the wheat until the
first of twenty-two lorries came to
take away the loads of wheat to all the
different stores that are many miles
and hours away.

When we went back over to Ireland on
Saturday 23 July, it was all go. When
we reached the North side of Dublin on
a farm between Swords and Ashbourne, we
met up with Michael Hoey and his family
and some of the workers from their farm
at Country Crest. They had two big,
state of the art, New Holland combines
on tracks as well as an old combine
from Armstrong Machinery, the local New
Holland dealer in North Dublin, which
was being used for filming, by the “Ear
to the Ground” team led by Darragh
McCullough. They were interviewing
Ireland’s top comedian, Brendan Grace,
about the re-release of his combine
harvester song that was such a massive
hit for him all those years back. And
with this all going on Michael’s wife
Geraldine and daughters Emma, Grace and
Orla where getting a barbeque ready for
the boys and they also had some good
old Soda and wheaten bread at hand with
some tea as well.

After leaving the field we moved up to
another team of Country Crest workers,
at work baling a heavy field of straw
at a farm at Ballyboughal in north Co
Dublin. Having loaded the big bales on
to the trailer they then took them back
to the Country Crest cattle farm, where
they will be used for bedding.
Our next journey heading northwards
took us to Myles O’Reilly’s farm at
Drumcar in Co Louth, where we met up
with Myles and his team they were
cutting a 27 acre field of winter
barley. Myles, who is a very loyal
Massey Ferguson fan had two combines
out today and some of his collection of
tractors as well, and his friends
Francie and Joe McBride from Co Armagh
had brought along an old New Holland
combine to lend a hand as well.