This is the Kingham Agriculture team…
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From Left to right: Neil, Breanna, James, Daniel and Jenny Kingham. Harvest time is a time where everyone gets involved. Missing from this photo is my father, Jim.Harvest is full of long days where we run a header, chaser bin and field bins that load trucks as they continue a relay between the paddock and the bulk handler to deliver our grain.
Harvest is also a race against time – for once a crop is ripe, rainfall causes damage to the grain making it less valuable to our customers. Excessive rain at harvest time can also cause potential damage to the soil from the heavy harvest machinery. As a result of those considerations, we start harvesting as soon as the crop is ripe and work as long and fast as possible until it is done. We have a number of excellent clients who buy feed grains from us off farm throughout the year and we are hoping to increase that market in the future. Feed grains represent approximately 50% of our produce. |
So who are we? Just one of the many family agriculture businesses doing the best we can. We focus on cropping in a dry land environment. We adopt new technologies which are beneficial to the land that we farm. As those in agriculture will tell you, farmers are most successful when the land is managed in a way that allows it to do what it does best – grow plants. We just help it do what it does best and we take our stewardship of the land very seriously.
My dear wife Jenny works off farm and balances the demands of being a farming wife and executing the responsibilities of her job to the best of her ability – not an easy balance. Our two eldest have been at university and returned home at harvest to work and our youngest, Daniel, has just joined me full time on the farm as a trainee.
My father Jim comes out to the farm most days. As a child, one of his early jobs on the farm was riding the Clydsedale horses, which pulled the header, into the dam during the heat of the day at harvest to cool them down. Now he can sit in a machine with 500 horses under the bonnet that steers itself while the operator sits in air conditioned comfort.