Autumn seems to have arrived early this year, but the harvest is slightly later. Usually by the time schools go back fields are filling with hay bales, discs of gold lying around as if on a giant’s draughts board. Where I live in the Borders, however, it’s only in the past fortnight that the combine harvesters, balers and tractors have been out in force, bringing in the crops before the next storm.

At midnight earlier this week I lay listening to the mechanical whine of machines at the end of the village, working by the beam of their headlights. Last night activity had shifted to the land beyond our back garden, the air thrumming as the mammoth blades scythed through waist-high wheat.

So much for the fabled tranquillity of the countryside. While city folk assume we yokels are slumbering, untroubled by sirens and rowdy clubbers, we are in fact frequently woken as the agricultural schedule goes into overdrive. I find it a reassuring sound, a welcome sign that despite a year of ceaseless rain and too little sun, there is something worth gathering in.

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As the harvest gets underway, high-tech machines pass our windows at all hours of day and night. Trailers that rattled by minutes ago return heaped high with yellow grain. That sight won’t have changed much in centuries, and it’s strange how satisfying it is to observe, as if awareness of the need to have a good store of food to see us through the colder months is an inborn instinct.

Some tractors are so enormous they plough over the edge of the village green, leaving tyre tracks that wouldn’t shame a Sherman tank. Big enough and loud enough to make Jeremy Clarkson hyperventilate, their reverberation sets off car alarms. At this time of year, drivers take corners with caution, knowing a Leviathan could be heading straight for them, barely allowing room to squeeze past.

September sunlight on hillsides stripped bare, leaving only corn-coloured stubble, is one of the highlights of the calendar. It’s a cameo of the rural idyll that makes even Glaswegian visitors wonder, fleetingly, if they’d like living out here (try it!)

But we shouldn’t be fooled. Harvest is crunch time for arable farmers, and behind it lies not just punishingly long hours and hard physical work, but the outcome of the previous 12 months’ ploughing, sowing, nurturing and weather-watching. Few occupations face a more foreboding deadline, and one whose consequences they can do nothing to change. For many farmers, the yield they get will mean the difference between financial survival and running into the red.

It’s not surprising that the origin of today’s sophisticated banking system is directly related to harvest. In Europe in the middle ages, when the seasonal nature of agriculture underpinned the economy, those dependent on the produce of their land often couldn’t make ends meet without a bit of help.

Seeing an opportunity to enrich themselves, well-off merchants lent money, at a price, to tide them over between planting and harvesting their crops. This agreement was known as “putting out” and had it not been for this safety-net, countless medieval farmers would have gone to the wall. In that sense, despite quantum leaps in science and technology, little has changed. Farmers and bankers remain umbilically linked.

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Reaping enough to pay off debts and set aside money to prepare for the year to come is a headache, as is getting everything in before rain and wind ruin it. But these are not the only problems harvest brings. A farmer’s wife told me recently that in certain parts of the country farm workers are being intimidated by groups of youths and are locking themselves into their tractor cabins for safety.

A couple of weeks ago hay bales in a nearby village were set alight, and police are treating it as fire raising. The thought of flames destroying good hay, intended for animal feed, is deeply disturbing. Such attacks are not uncommon, and are by no means restricted to Scotland, but they are symptomatic of a society that is heedless of the importance of harvest. Clearly this applies even to those who live in the country and know the effort that goes into working it.

Other than the lucky few whose plots enable them to be self-sufficient, every one of us depends on harvest-time. Some of us became more acutely aware of how important our wheat producers are at the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022. Overnight the reduction in its wheat exports sent global wheat prices soaring, and with it the price of products such as bread, eggs and meat. At the time, the UK farming community stressed that home-grown wheat accounts for most of the wheat used here for human consumption, and that the bulk of the additional grain we import comes from Germany and Canada.

That was reassuring. At the same time, however, this unexpected crisis was a reminder of how vital British-grown food is to our economy and our national security. We needed that wake-up call, because in recent decades we seem to have lost the connection to where our produce comes from. Blinkered to the reality of seasonal availability, unaware of when, say, gooseberries or rocket are ready to pick, we have been happy to eat fruit, salad and vegetables flown in from the other side of the world, despite the supercharged price and the cost to the environment.

(Image: Harvest time)

We might not be facing war, but these are uncertain times, and one of the priorities of any country keen to protect its people is to prioritise food production. By so doing, if worst comes to worst, we can at least feed ourselves.

Harvest is a time when, in the countryside, you cannot fail to be aware of where the produce we eat comes from. Yet while Keats wrote memorably of the season of “mellow fruitfulness”, he neglected to mention that it is also a time of intense stress for those whose labours are essential to bringing it home.

On Wednesday a harvest moon will appear in the evening sky, so-called because it used to be relied on to light harvesters working into night. Take a look as it rises, and hope that by then, farmers’ barns will be filled with enough grain and hay to tide us through the winter.