Old style wheat harvesting

click photo to enlarge
The Bicker Steam Threshing & Classic Car weekend held in the Lincolnshire village each September features a vintage Foster threshing machine powered by a traction engine separating the wheat seeds from the stalks. For this to happen regularly over the two day event a quantity of wheat has to be cut and saved. This must be done in a more traditional manner, without the involvement of a combine harvester. I was invited to photograph this recently. My photograph here shows a Lanz powered binder of c.1950 vintage pulled by a Fiat 90.90 tractor from (I think) the 1980s, cutting the wheat, binding it in "stooks" and laying it in rows ready to be forked onto a trailer.

photo and text © Tony Boughen

Photo Title: Cutting and Binding Wheat for Bicker Steam Threshing
Camera: Olympus E-M10
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 39mm (78mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec
ISO:200
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Where do all the straw bales go?

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There was a time, not so many decades ago, when some English farmers burned the straw on the fields after getting in the cereal crop. This environmentally damaging solution to what to do with the left-overs from harvest has long since been banished to history. The fact that it caused dangerous driving conditions on nearby roads was at least as strong an argument as that concerning greenhouse gases. The loss of nutrients provided by the burnt straw notwithstanding, few lament the demise of burning in the fields.

And yet, burning does actually remain one of the ways that straw is used. Over the past couple of years a straw-burning power station has been built and opened near Sleaford, Lincolnshire. There the bales are converted into electricity with considerably fewer environmental consequences than direct burning (though inevitably with some repercussions), and local farmers have an outlet for their "waste". I'd be interested to know the ranges of use to which straw is put today. Animal bedding remains, of course, and some houses (very few actually) have been built using the rectangular bales as wall insulation. A couple of years ago I spoke to a farmer who was selling bales to the Ministry of Defence to use for demolishing some disused fortified buildings by fire! Straw board is still made and used and a proportion of straw is ploughed back into the soil. However, I see veritable mountains of bales dotted around Lincolnshire of which very few look older than a year. One of my tasks this autumn must be to answer this question - "Where do all the straw bales go?"

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 45mm (67mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Old and new cultivation

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Only a few minutes before I took today's photograph we walked across a pasture that showed clear evidence of medieval cultivation. The surface of the field undulated due to centuries of ploughing using oxen and horses. Generations of ploughmen had gone up and down each selion (a strip in a furlong, which themselves were aggregated into large open fields) in the same direction each season. As a result the ploughshare had made each selion into a long, straight, low bank that curved to the left at each end where the plough was turned. Our passage across the field rose and fell as we went over each ridge and furrow.

The contrast between this traditional method of cultivation, one that prevailed for over a thousand years, with the sight that greeted us as we crossed a recently harvested wheat field, could not have been greater. A single man in a large tractor pulled a machine that was preparing the land and sowing the next crop at the same time. He would accomplish in a few hours that which formerly took many men and animals weeks to achieve. The driver gave us a wave as passed by - such work today is a solitary undertaking - and as we went on our way back to Folkingham I reflected on the way today's cultivation contrasted with not only the distant past but what happened for much of the twentieth century.

Nowadays, as I understand it, there are essentially 5 approaches to preparing a wheat field with the next crop:
1 Conventional ploughing - plough the straw in deep, cultivate the seed bed, then drill and finally spread fertiliser
2 Shallow cultivation - plough the straw in deep, drill and fertilise in one pass
3 Minimal tillage - till the straw in shallow with cultivator, drill and fertilise in one pass
4 Shallow tillage - turn straw over in the surface soil, drill and fertilise in one pass in this layer
5 Direct drilling - no soil tillage, simply drill and fertilise in one pass leaving the straw on the surface.

However, I'm no expert, so watching the man and machines at work I was unsure which method of 3-5 was being used. I think it's 3 (minimal tillage) but I'm happy to be corrected.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Nikon D5300
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 105mm (157mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f8
Shutter Speed: 1/400 sec
ISO:100
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Harvest done, swifts gone

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Towards the end of my third summer living on Lincolnshire's Fens may be a little early in terms of formulating theories about the region, but one did occur to me yesterday.

I've been watching the cereal harvest come to its end. Over the past few weeks wheat and barley fields have been falling to the combine harvesters, and already quite a few have been turned by the plough. Here and there the odd field is still being cut, but with less urgency than earlier, giving the tractor drivers who haul away the grain the chance to get out of their cabs and have a chat, as in my photograph above. The summers of 2007 and 2008 were much wetter than this year, and the harvest continued well into September, with machines kept off the sodden ground until it had dried. Cereals were left standing to enable them to get as dry as possible, and when they were harvested the grain sheds thundered to the sound of the electric dryers.

However, this year Eastern England has experienced much more typical weather with light but regular rainfall and fine weather. As the harvest winds down at the end of August I've been watching the skies trying to note when I see the last of the swifts (Apus apus). This interesting, fast-flying bird arrives in the UK in May and leaves at the end of August. It is a species that spends almost all its life on the wing, even eating and sleeping as it flies. Its stay in our country is long enough to raise a brood in its nest under eaves and in church towers, the only time it spends on terra firma. So what is my theory, you may be wondering? Well, perhaps it's the case that, in this part of the world, in a typical year, the end of the harvest and the departure of the swifts coincide. Not an earth shattering theory, I'll grant you, but one that I'll test each year. Incidentally, after two "swift-free" days I saw a lone bird yesterday when I took this photograph.

Note 1: The church on the extreme left of the horizon is St Mary, Swineshead, that features in yesterday's post.
Note 2: Today the wheat field opposite my house was cut and I saw one swift.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 40mm (80mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Harvest evening

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One of the things that photography does very well is document the past. Yet, inevitably, when the photographs were taken that recorded the world of the past, it was the present. In fact, it's probably true to say that most photographs that we use today to see what the past was like weren't taken with that purpose in mind. The exceptions to this rule include the work of documentary photographers such as recently deceased Jimmy Forsyth (1913-2009) who chronicled a disappearing kind of working class life in North-East England, and also the work of specialists associated with heritage organisations who document buildings, transport, artefacts, etc.

I must say that I've only rarely taken photographs with a view to recording something for posterity, yet I suppose that quite a few of my images could be used in that way. However, two years ago, at the beginning of August, I took the photograph shown above. I took it because it was unusual in showing a method of collecting and transporting straw that seemed to have died out. As I write this piece the combine harvesters are rolling over the Fenland wheat fields, gathering up the seed, depositing the straw in neat lines, and other machines are coming along and converting those rows into multiple, squat, cylindrical bales. That has been the way for many years now, and yet here were these trailers piled up with straw that, for all I know, could have been loaded with pitchforks. It was like a scene from fifty years ago. Swap the wheels for ones with wooden spokes and rims wrapped with steel, and it could be a scene from a hundred years ago. Why this reversion to times past, I thought? Had the baling machine broken down? Was someone shooting a movie that was set in the 1950s? I'll never know, but what I do know is that if this image only existed as a print it would be impossible to date it with any accuracy. As a digital file, of course, it carries its birth certificate wherever it goes!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 11mm (22mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On