A Toast to Bread - Australia

For those who haven't really seen what it takes to get your loaf of bread, I wanted to outline at least the harvest. This doesn't include the tilling, the seeding, maybe a spraying or two, the praying for rain (but not too much and not at the wrong time) and most of all, a lot of hard work.

At harvest, you first have to clean out and dry your trucks.

You have a gather up your equipment. A header, a chaser bin, a mother bin, a couple of silos, the fuel, the people to run the equipment and then a couple weeks of lovely weather.

Since we're talking about nearly 2000 acres of wheat to harvest, you have to also make sure you've got the augers working and the appropriate safeguards in place to store your grain (like insect preventions, rain protection and that every grease point has been attended to).

Tools are very important.






Here is the business end of the Header. This is where the grain gets cut from the stalks: there are triangular razors that shimmy to cut the seed heads. The seed heads are then brought to the middle to be winnowed under the machine.

After the grain is winnowed, it drops to the bottom and gets augered to the bin behind the driver. This is where the sticks and bits get blown back out onto the ground and renews the soil.

The Combine (header) fills much more quickly than the Chaser Bin (which is the container behind the John Deere tractor). As the Header fills, the driver will put out the auger so that the Chaser driver knows to pull closer. The idea is to keep the grain being taken out of the field in the most constant, effective way possible.


The Chaser bin is filled after three approaches to the Header. The driver will then race across the paddock to where the Mother bin is kept and auger out all that's been taken out of the header - and then go back, since the Header is probably filled by that time. The Mother bin is called that since it's usually much larger than the other containers and that's where the trucks will pull up to be filled to go to the grain depot.

Here is the Header, filling the Chaser as it fills a truck directly. There is an additional silo for a back-up. The grain depots have been slowed by equipment failures and we have to accomodate for that time lost on one end of the process in any way we can.




A view from the Header.

You want to park your ute in the shade (it's nearly 100 degrees outside today) for when the sun sets at 9:30 p.m. and the day's work is done.

A view from the grain door as you try to eyeball 42.5 tonnes, which is your registered truck load.

Driving the grain out of the paddocks.




Your truck is weighed, both on the way in and the way out.

Each truck has a sample taken from its load. This is taken by vacuum.


She tests the sample...




then you get the test results, which stands as your record of the date and what you delivered, from which paddock and at what quality and quantity.




There's a lot of waiting, but the truck is air conditioned, thankfully.






The truck is either emptied slowly into the auger to travel to the top of the grain pyramid, or the truck may be dumped directly onto the tarps set to keep the grain dry. Powerful hydraulics behind the trailer makes this the fastest way to unload the grain...and the most impressive, to me.

To average out the truckloads, this year the trucks went back and forth to the grain depot a total of 90 times between the two trucks for a total of nearly 2300 tonnes of wheat.

Could someone please give that gal a hat?!


Nice job, my friends!