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We find the Massey Harris 780 Combine Harvester sitting, in pieces, in the yard of Philip Shotbolt's farm. When it was first manufactured, this machine did for farming what the Model T Ford did for motoring: it transformed the countryside. Bringing mechanisation to a range of processes that had previously required lots of time and labour, the combine harvester heralded the profound shift from agriculture to agribusiness.
Between 1953 and 1962 some 28,793 of these Massey Harris 780s were built. Now, only a dozen or so remain. Philip has fond memories of the excitement of harvest time when he was a boy, and vividly remembers the 780s moving across the landscape 'like a row of red beetles'. At that time, five men worked full-time on his family's Lincolnshire farm and there were many more at harvest time. Now there is only Philip, thanks largely to the mechanisation process that started back then.
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Most of the damage to our 780 seems to be cosmetic rather than structural, so it looks as though the job of restoring it will be fairly simple. To find out just what's involved, we take it to the king of combine restoration, Ron Knight. He has the largest private collection of farm machinery in the country, but just can't stop restoring more.
As soon as we strip down the combine harvester, we discover that there is a massive amount of damage inside which will double the work we need to do. We also encounter a bit of a mystery. Somehow the back beater – a metal drum that spins at around 1500rpm pulling the straw to the back of the machine – has been totally smashed.
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While the engineers get on with fixing it, Suggs disappears to the fields of north Norfolk and to the farm of Clive Cooper. He's gone in search of some old film of our 780 and a few reminiscences.
But tripping on a stone in one of Clive's fields he literally stumbles on the cause of our battered back beater. The fields in which our combine spent most of its working life are covered in flints. It's a fair bet that one of them managed to find its way up into the combine, breaking the beater into pieces.
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Once the beater has been repaired, we run into another unwelcome problem. We had hoped to be able to cut the wheat of Philip's farm, just as his father did 40 years ago. But an unexpectedly good summer has brought the harvest forward. Worse still, Ron has had to go and help his son harvest his 600 acres.
With the engineering department reduced by 50%, Claire has to work flat out to get the combine ready. After a lot of late nights, we finally have a perfectly restored 'red beetle' ready to cut the last two acres of wheat left standing in England.
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