With the southern 2021 winter cereal harvest well under, and the big machines are working in tandem gathering the grain from the big paddocks, it is worth while remembering a time when the harvest was not quite so sophisticated.
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One farmer who can put many harvests under his belt is Ken Male.
"As long as I can climb this ladder into the driving seat of the header, I will keep working," Ken Male said as he contemplated his 68th winter crop harvest at the family farm, Elgin, Henty.
"Or until the young blokes can find a more experienced bloke who has more years behind them!
"I don't do all the driving ... but I do a fair percentage of it."
When discussing the amount of work Ken does with the harvest, his son Anthony thought his father had driven the header during last seasons harvest for about 90 percent of the time.
"I enjoy it and I'll keep going while I can," Ken said.
"I'd much rather be out here helping on the farm than sitting at home in Henty fiddling around."
Ken's parents moved to the Henty district farm from Barellan in 1948 when the property of 530ha was bought as the base of an aggregation, which has now expanded to 2850 ha in 2021 as part of the family business involving both his sons Anthony and David.
During a severe drought at Barellan in the early 1920's, his grandfather had leased country near Wodonga as a relief block while Ken's father began working with the Paech family who had country on the Billabong Creek.
"They were growing wheat yielding about 10 to 12 bags to the acre, which was quite good for those days and Dad got a job driving the header and carting wheat into the silos at Walla Walla," Ken said.
"After that year, Dad always wanted to get back down this way and he got the opportunity in 1946 when Elgin came on the market but he didn't have enough money."
The 1947 harvest at Barellan was quite good, following another very bad drought in 1946.
"It was a self-sown crop of wheat and that gave Dad a bit of equity and when he rang the agent after the harvest to enquire about Elgin but was told the farm was taken off the market," Ken said.
"But the agent rang back a bit later and said the place was on the market and Dad bought it."
Ken said it was the bad years his father had experienced at Barellan and when he got to see other areas which were growing crops through dry seasons he decided to move.
"But it took him 20 years after he had been at the Paech's farm at Walla Walla to move here," Ken said.
"But it was the best move he ever did."
Ken's first harvest experience in 1953 was sowing the bags of wheat as they were filled by the tractor drawn power-take-off (PTO) header.
That header was an HST manufactured by HV McKay's Sunshine Harvester Works at Sunshine, in Melbourne, and pulled by a Bulldog tractor which had been manufactured in Germany.
But during the next harvest in 1954, he had graduated to driving the header although he was too young to have a truck licence so his brother Neville drove the truck.
That header was a No 2 McKay header and Ken also remembered another header purchased by his father was a No 6 also manufactured by McKay.
For all of his early harvests, Ken sowed the bags of wheat because bulk handling of the grain crop didn't come to be a serious proposition until the late 1950's.
"It was actually bag to bulk and the first one we had was an auger attached to the side of the truck where we would bag from the header and then drop the bags into the auger," he said.
"I did lump bags but not for very long, luckily.
"We were taking bags to the silos when I started and we used skewers, two steel pins to hold the tops of the bags and dropped the bags into the hoppers at the silos."
The great stacks of bags built at railway sidings and ready to be loaded onto trains was an operation before Ken's time.
"They were probably bags of oats," Ken said.
Meanwhile in conversation, Ken was able to clearly recall all the headers he has operated on the family farm.
"The next header was a 508 Massy-Ferguson also PTO, then we had two Massy Ferguson 585 before we moved to self-propelled headers when we bought an International 8-5 in 1970," he said.
"That was traded in for an International 725 and the we got into New Holland's - the first one was a TR 85, then we had a TR 89 and now we have a CR 9070."
Among many advances made to the wheat industry he has seen during the past 68 years, Ken ascribes the higher yielding varieties to be the most critical.
"I think they have come from better research and desire from farmers to have varieties which we can grow through tough seasons," he said.
"But our farming practices have changed a lot in my lifetime.
"Direct drilling with less ploughing has been a big step, using lime and Urea has helped lift crop yields."
Going back to the early 1950's, Ken said the amount of crop grown and the availability of machinery was on a par with the current enterprise on Elgin.
"We were harvesting about 160ha, which was a fair amount of land for the machinery we had at the time," he said.
"And as we got bigger we bought our second machine."
Farming practices during Ken's early days were focused on building soil fertility through the use of legume-based pastures in a medium term rotation.
"It was mainly two crops of wheat, then oats in the third year was undersown with clover and left out for three years," he said.
Among the biggest changes Ken has seen during his wheat growing career are the advent of higher yielding crops and the advanced technology of the machinery.
"Every machine is getting better," he said.
"The ease of delivery to the receival sites is amazing."
Ken recalled silos which could only take 60 tonnes per hour but now the modern grain receival complexes can take much more.
He can also remember the 1944 drought at Barellan.
"Dad and I were down the paddock and a whopping big dust storm came up," he said.
"He told me to follow the fence back to the house and I kept close to the fence because you couldn't see ahead for the dust."
Another time Ken recalled returning home after the family had been for a holiday at Wollongong, and watching his mother break down in tears
"She opened the door and found the house, everything was all covered in dust," he said.
"That drought lasted from 1942 until 1946, there was four years of drought."
He has also seen a few dry years at Henty, but said the 2021 season was shaping up to be the best he had ever seen.
The commodity prices were very good and the rain fell at the right time and in sufficient amounts.
"Everything was just too good," he said.
"Then we got 200mm rain in November, and from looking at a good harvest I think it will now be downgraded.
"Still, we missed a bullet when you look at those blokes up north."
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