While visiting Australia to film the 2013/14 wheat Harvest at Miralwyn, we met up with a team of workers from Miralwyn cotton.
They were getting ready to cut 10,000 hectares between Walgett and Brewarrina. Under farm manager John Ellis, they had a fine team in place with some of the latest modern machinery, which included six big Claas combines, three chaser bins and the big mother bins that sit along the headlands to store the wheat until the first of twenty-two lorrys came to take away the loads of wheat to all the different stores that are many miles and hours away.

When we went back over to Ireland on Saturday 23 July, it was all go. When we reached the North side of Dublin on a farm between Swords and Ashbourne, we met up with Michael Hoey and his family and some of the workers from their farm at Country Crest. They had two big, state of the art, New Holland combines on tracks as well as an old combine from Armstrong Machinery, the local New Holland dealer in North Dublin, which was being used for filming, by the “Ear to the Ground” team led by Darragh McCullough. They were interviewing Ireland’s top comedian, Brendan Grace, about the re-release of his combine harvester song that was such a massive hit for him all those years back. And with this all going on Michael’s wife Geraldine and daughters Emma, Grace and Orla where getting a barbeque ready for the boys and they also had some good old Soda and wheaten bread at hand with some tea as well.

After leaving the field we moved up to another team of Country Crest workers, at work baling a heavy field of straw at a farm at Ballyboughal in north Co Dublin. Having loaded the big bales on to the trailer they then took them back to the Country Crest cattle farm, where they will be used for bedding.
Our next journey heading northwards took us to Myles O’Reilly’s farm at Drumcar in Co Louth, where we met up with Myles and his team they were cutting a 27 acre field of winter barley. Myles, who is a very loyal Massey Ferguson fan had two combines out today and some of his collection of tractors as well, and his friends Francie and Joe McBride from Co Armagh had brought along an old New Holland combine to lend a hand as well.

Combines were busy all around the country today and as we headed towards the border we called at Mc Parland's farm outside Dundalk,where two of John Dan O Hare's combines were just finishing cutting 150 acres of good standing crop .As they were finishing John Dan's son Danny got a call to move up to another 110 acre farm at Knockbridge about 10 miles away ,along with Fergal and their two Lexion Montana Claas combines and join their other driver Brian on his Big New Holland combine.It was not long before they made big inroads into the crop .