Off to the land down under :D: Farmer Ryan

I’m about 8 days in to my new job, and it is both fun and hard. The actual work isn’t too bad, but the days are long, working 14-16 hours a day 7 days a week, in the last 7 days I have worked 84 hours, which is nice as I get $22 per hour. What I do here is drive harvesters (AKA headers), fun as it’s a massive machine with loads of buttons and leavers. Driving and manoeuvring a 5m high machine with the front end being 39ft wide, driving parallel within 60cm to a trailer being towed by a tractor, its hard to write down how difficult it is, but it is.

Its been exciting at some points too… My harvester caught fire, which was, fun.. Was just cutting crops and my header cut out, got out to have a look and notice smoke, and flames. Remember I am harvesting in a 200acre paddock in 35*c heat with 30mph winds and its bone dry, so putting out a fire is more urgent than usual. If a fire goes out of control here, it can be a case where no matter how fast you run the fire will out run you. It took 2 hours and 500l of water, but it went out, and its going to take 4 days to fix, disaster averted. Also we ran out water, another big issue, as I need to drink it. We had to drive to town with a water tanker in tow to get some drinking water, Australia is in a bit of a drought.

The wildlife is amazing, even the birds are fantastic, beautiful exotic birds are ‘pests’ here. Wild horses, kangaroos, lizards and so much more, what is normal to people that live here feels like I am on safari.

You know what is strange though, that I get really bad hayfever is Guernsey, but here where I am surrounded by fresh cut crops, winds blowing it in to my face all day, and its not too bad, strange.

I’m not able to take photos at the moment really as I had to buy a special phone for rural areas, and the camera is less than usable. But I do have a few random snaps below.

Anyway, as It rained yesterday and is still drizzling a little bit, I wont be harvesting today. Grain has to meet certain criteria before it can be sold, which includes a moisture level. It needs to be practically bone dry, and its going to take a day or two of hot sunshine to dry out the grain, so basically its now the weekend for me. Yay.