The days of firsts

The first days have gone by with a steady, but quick pace. Tuesday starter with a 6AM wake up and 7AM arrival to the farm. And it was late start. As I heard during the day, some folks start harvesting potatoes already at 2AM! Why? Because you need to have some trucks already loaded and ready for washing and packing at the shed when the shed crew comes along between 5-6AM. So I had a fairly late start J

The first day was really about getting to know a bit about the equipment they are using here and having a drive with them. All tractors are John Deere production and only a year or two old. I had a go with 3 different ones, did some deliveries of fertilizers to a couple of fields, seeding a bit

of wheat on a small plot just to keep the wind from blowing away the soil (read: sand) and making a sandstormevery now and then and also managed to do some ploughing. First time for everything or what! All machines are big, with fully automatic gearboxes but still very different in their build. While with some you just play with a number of buttons to set the speed and revs, then with others you still need to use pedals. Oh my, manual work J. It was interesting, especially considering that my only experience with a tractor is an old red (and/or blue) Belarus. Yet as the guys around here said – when you could drive a Belarus, you can drive anything. Apparently it’s true, because those machines are indeed easy to drive. And so it went, first day of firsts with 8,5 hours of worktime.

Wednesday was a whole different day, initially I was supposed dissassemble a seeder unit and replace most of it’s pipes and hoses but as someone had lost a much needed bolt to attach the seeder to the tractor, there were other things lined up. Oh yeah, firstly, talking about me I am usuallytalking about me and Pete as he is stuck with me basically the whole time to teach and show everything. And secondly it seems a great deal of things either get lost or broker around here (which is ok) but noone really tells about it as it happens. It’s always some time later some other guy finding it out. So in the morning all workers were given a strong warning and apparently if you mess up, you will step out of the door.

So the day went by pretty much doing two things – installing a video camera in one part of the seeder (where the grain will be held) with making a stand for the screen in the tractor and watching a truck full of seeds getting stuck in soft ground while unloading the seeds into a temporary storage. A grand total of 9h 15 minutes of work J. Well I actually did work in the full sense of it, I just don’t know how to describe everything I do here. And quite frankly, it is tiring. By the way, filling the tank of a tractor with diesel can be quite expensive if yu did it in a regular gas station – 320L of diesel with a price of around 1,5AUD / L is not what you’d call cheap. Our station in the farm premices offers you a wonderful deal however – just 0,20AUD / L J.