So, you like peanuts, do you?

I used to like peanuts. Good things to have around when you're slipping into a few beers, peanut butter is a staple food of fat kids everywhere; and of course who doesn't like a Satay? I'll tell you who, me, that's who. This year we grew 160 hectares of peanuts as an opportunity crop following some rain in early December. I've never had anything to do with them before and if I have my way, I'll never have anything to do with them again. They are the most tedious, dirty, dusty crop to work with I've ever had anything to do with in my life. Everything (and there are a lot of things) has to be done at two or three kilometers an hour: digging them, rolling them, fluffing them and threshing them.
Then comes the fun part; cleaning them. This, laze and gem, is a peanut cleaner -

Your Satay starts here. 
And that is as dust-free as it gets. Fourteen hours a day standing in the middle of dust so thick that sometimes you literally can't see your hand in front of your face, pushing the machine past its limits trying to keep up to two threshers, shovelling up your mistakes and then the fun part starts; on the cleaner there are four conveyor belts, a set of sizing rollers, an agitator table and a fan. The fan doesn't break. Yet. Everything else likes to have a little rest. Often. Apparently this particular cleaner, which was originally designed by a bloke in Dalby to clean corn kernels, is a major step up from the old days. I'm fuckin' glad these aren't the old days.