Down at the end of the field there's a sunshine glint on something metal. Kevin, sitting here with me, high in the harvester, tells me that the gunman is waiting for the rabbits to break cover in front of the combine.

Their nemesis, he says, is a funeral director from Ware. The undertaker, who looks like the vicar from Dad's Army, is a good shot, which is just as well for human beings because Ragborough Common slopes down to the A10 just below and he could easily bag a Volvo on its way to Cambridge.

It's an ill wind. The bunnies had made their home in a bean field and Kevin would rather be harvesting wheat. But the remaining crop is in fields too wet to cut. The chances are too great of the combine, 17 tons when fully loaded, getting stuck or breaking down. “Give us ten good days,” he says. “That's all we need.”

There is nothing depressed about Kevin, which may seem strange amid all this talk of terrible harvests: talk that conjures up biblical tales of famine and locusts, crops rotting in the fields, dust bowls, botched five-year plans and farming bankruptcies. Here, in Hertfordshire, as in other places in Britain, the harvest is in trouble, but the farmers aren't despairing.

Kevin's boss, Andrew Watts, lives in the rectangular brick farmhouse at Mentley Farm, and manages the holdings of a local family concern, J&R Wallace. The Wallaces, he tells me, were one of several Scots families who bought up farms in Hertfordshire during the Great Agricultural Depression of the 1880s, and now he runs 6,000 acres on their behalf. In the late 1950s this one concern would have made up a dozen or so separate farms, spread out around Knebworth, Hitchin and Hertford.

Half of Mentley Farm is laid to wheat, with the rest being malting barley, rape, beans and even some peas. “Peas are difficult,” Andrew says. It is the wheat that is so late this year, with 1,200 acres, more than a third, still in the field. That is a problem in itself but Andrew was planning to begin sowing next year's crop on Monday. Obviously, in those fields still unharvested, he can't.

This rain-affected harvest is the latest he can recall. Looking at his records, he sees that previous harvests have all been collected within three days, either way, of September 4.

In addition, what he is now harvesting is wet. Wet wheat lasts three days before it degrades, becoming mouldy. When dry, wheat can lie for three years without a problem. The Wheatmaster grinder on the work surface in his tidy, tiny office, is giving readings of 24 per cent moisture on the harvested wheat, and Andrew needs to dry it to 18 per cent or less.

This he does by driving his yellow JCB like the clappers, with all the speed and alacrity that a child might use to zoom a toy dumper truck, into a store of wet wheat, and then transferring the grain to a hopper leading to the Alvan Blanch Grain Drier.

This is a sort of skip with a fire at one end and a moving rack above and below that conveys wheat round the flame like a gigantic version of one of those hotel toasters. It's expensive in terms of fuel, and what Juno in the movie of the same name would call a “time-suck”, because for each combine hour, Andrew now needs to spend six hours drying.

So will he give up? Might he have to plough in part of this year's crop and plant over it? “Goodness, no!” Andrew replies. “You've got to harvest it, haven't you? You've worked all year for it! In all the years I've been farming we've never bypassed a field yet.”

Andrew still expects to get the full harvest in by the 30th. It will have cost him a bit more than in past years but by juggling the beans and the wheat, planting in some fields while others are still to be cut, by having some wheat reclassified as lower-grade, he is confident that he will make it all work. It will be worse in some places, he acknowledges, but better in others.

You look at the farm, its new machinery, its obviously hard-working employees, its can-do manager, and you see an operation and people who simply aren't passive victims of the elements. And, of course, the glint on the undertaker's gun barrel was sunshine. Later there was a red sky at night.

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