Day 67 - Mungindi, hanging with my niece Stacey. Gather round everyone, come on in close and I will tell you a wonderful tale about wheat, which for you city slickers is what they use to make flour. I have been lucky enough to have the privilege of a guided tour of a property whilst the wheat harvest was taking place. On the left you get some idea of how big the paddocks are, wheat for as far as the eye can see, and if I had turned around it was the same again in the other direction.

Next are the silos where the wheat is stored until such time that it gets transported to the flour mills, docks for export etc. This particular set of silos can store around 65,000 tons of wheat, which is a shitload of weetbix. On the right you can see a truck of full of wheat on the weighbridge being weighed before the wheat is dumped into the silos.

Next are the trucks lined up waiting to empty their loads into the silos, they go into the paddocks and collect the wheat from storage bins that are filled from the headers. The photograph doesn't show all the trucks, I couldn't fit them all in.

It's very impressive, but it's even more impressive when I tell you that this is just one property, the silos belong to the property and are for their sole use. They have 15 headers working 24 hours a day and harvest around 5,000 tons of wheat a day. The silos cannot hold the full harvest so some of the trucks go straight to GrainCorp silos in the next town. You have to see it to believe it, especially at night when the whole place lights up like a small town. The pictures sadly don't show the heat, the noise, the dust and the wind which make it all very yucky.

Finally a picture of a header that had a little accident, they think a fuel line ruptured, the bloke driving it made a very hasty exit! It was a very expensive fire; you won't get much change from $600,000 for a new header.