Watch: Farmer Writes – following the harvest across America

My name is David O’Malley. I’m 26 and from Islandeady, outside Castlebar, Co Mayo. I am working my fourth silage season in the USA for Neutral View Harvesting.

In Ireland, I had been driving milk delivery trucks for Arrabawn and Aurivo. My sister convinced me to pack up sticks and try working abroad. In December 2013, I decided I just wanted a change and applied to a couple of different companies. I landed on 19 March in 2014.

I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I had helped out on my uncles’ farms. I had driven tractors and hauled silage, but only on a really small scale for my uncles’ use.

The company I work for is Neutral View Harvesting and is Canadian-owned, but based out of Montana in the US.

The company employs up to 16 harvest workers each season from Ireland, New Zealand, England and many other countries. This year, there are nine Irish, two English, two Canadian, one American and one New Zealander. The Irish employees are from counties Mayo, Kerry, Tipperary, Armagh and Tyrone, ranging in age from 20 to 28.

The company covers the guts of 40,000 acres each year between different crops such as wheat, alfalfa, triticale, oats, barley, peas and corn. All in all, we chop over 200,000t of silage each season.

We are currently working on a job in Kansas where we are chopping 2,500 acres of a mixture of wheat, alfalfa and triticale.

It is an Angus ranch, with over 2,000 head of cows on a ranch of 40,000-plus acres. After this job, we will head further north to Montana to work on more dairy farms and feedlots.

The company owns semi (articulated) trucks, eight tri-drive trucks, two Claas 970 forage harvesters and two John Deere packing tractors. The John Deere machines are a 9520 and a 9430.

The forage harvesters have pick-up headers, 10-row corn headers and 12-row earlage corn headers. The packing tractors have 14ft blades on the front for pushing the silage, each tractor with a total weight of 30t to pack the silage. The MacDon Swathers have both 30ft Draper headers and 16ft rotary headers. The Draper headers are able to lay 60ft rows of crop together for the forager to pick up.

The season starts in April in Texas, so when you first come to Montana in March, everyone is put through their commercial driving licence test by the company.

As soon as we get the licence, we all pack up the equipment and head on our two- or three-day journey south to Texas. This is a journey of over 1,600 miles. When we get there all the equipment is unloaded and put to work all around the same area.

We do this until we get back to Montana in June, then we split into two crews. One goes east and one goes west. Around the middle to the end of July, one of the crews heads back down south to start corn (maize) and then comes back to Montana in time for September. From September to November, both crews will work in Montana.

If you’re eager to learn and have an interest, you will learn so much about all the equipment they have, just like I did. I intend to do a fifth season over here and after that I will see what comes my way.