Combine Harvester Operator CV Examples & Writing Guide

This CV belongs to an operator who runs a lead machine for a harvest contractor and has also worked a single-farm job. It leads with machines, headers and hectares because that is the language a contractor hires in. The name and the operations are invented; the figures are the kind you can pull from your yield monitor, your run sheets and your service log.

Harvest jobs are filled quickly and often over the phone. Your CV mostly has to get you to that call. Four things decide it.

• Machines and headers. A person who has only run a 7.5 m rigid header on small fields is not ready for a 12 m draper in a 40-hectare wheat field. Name the makes, models and header widths.
• Crops and conditions. Wheat, barley, oilseed rape, beans, peas and oats each behave differently through the machine. Say which you have cut, and mention tough conditions if you have handled them: laid wheat, green stems, sloping ground, wet ground.
• Whether you can keep the machine running. In the middle of harvest a dealer call-out can take hours. Grease, chains, belts, bearings, hydraulic hoses and a concave change in the field are all worth listing.
• Driving and hauling. A C+E licence raises your value with almost any contractor because the same person can run a machine by day and haul grain or move kit at night. Say if you have one, or say you are willing to get one.

“The CVs I keep say what they cut and how much of it. Hectares a season, header width, what they did when a belt let go at midnight in Nebraska. The ones I pass on say "operated farm equipment", and a hundred people can say that.”

Farm work is measured, so there is no excuse for a CV without figures. These are the ones a contractor or farm manager recognises immediately.

• Hectares per season and hectares per day, by crop. "70 to 100 hectares a day in wheat" says more than any adjective.
• Grain loss. Total machine loss under 1%, or the loss target your operation held you to, plus how you check it (drop trays, loss monitor calibration).
• Tonnes moved or hauled, and the number of loads if you hauled on a C+E licence.
• Machine hours, downtime percentage, and the longest repair you completed in the field without a dealer call.
• Header width and machine class, because those set how much ground you can realistically cover.
• Seasons run, and how many years you have gone back to the same contractor or farm. Return invitations are the strongest reference in this trade.

The fix is almost always the same: name the machine, name the crop, add the number.

Three or four lines under your name. Seasons, machines, crops, hectares, licences. Use a career objective instead of a personal statement only if this would be your first harvest job.

Harvest work is seasonal by nature, and a CV that lists eight employers over eight years can look unstable to anyone outside agriculture. Present it the way the industry actually works.

1. 1Label each seasonal role as seasonal, with the months: "Seasonal, Jul 2020 to Present (July to October each year)". That single word removes the job-hopping question.
2. 2Group repeat seasons with the same contractor or farm into one entry, and say how many years you were invited back. Returning for six straight seasons is a reference in itself.
3. 3Fill the off-season honestly. Workshop jobs, livestock work, drilling and cultivations, the sugar beet or potato harvest, haulage, welding and machinery dealer jobs all read well next to harvest work.
4. 4If you took winters off, say so plainly: "Off-season: machinery repair and workshop work on the home farm". Farm employers understand it; silence looks worse than the truth.
5. 5Keep two referees who are contractors or farm owners, with mobile numbers. In this industry the phone call decides the hire.

You do not need a licence to run a combine in a field. You do need the right categories to drive farm machinery or haul grain on public roads, and that is where most of the paperwork sits.

• C+E licence: needed for articulated lorries hauling grain, and it makes you far more useful to a contractor. Say your licence is clean if it is.
• Driver CPC and medical: lorry licences need a medical, and most commercial lorry driving needs a current Driver CPC card. Say both are current.
• Farm machinery on the road: tractors are driven on category F, self-propelled farm machines have their own rules, and width, weight and speed limits apply. Do not claim an exemption on a CV; check GOV.UK for the machines you drive and say what you actually hold.
• Grain store and confined space safety training: worth listing on its own line. Entrapment in stored grain and work inside bins and driers are serious hazards in this work and employers pay attention.
• First aid, and a fire extinguisher check habit. Combine fires are common in dry, dusty crops, and mentioning that you check extinguishers daily is a small detail that reads as experience.
• Pesticide certificates (PA1 plus PA2 for a boom sprayer): only if you actually spray. Name the units you hold.

Contractors and farms do hire people with no combine time, usually into the chaser bin or lorry seat first, then into a machine the following year. Write the CV so that path is obvious.

• Apply for the job you can get. Chaser bin driver, lorry driver and harvest hand are realistic entry points, and most lead operators started in one of them.
• Show any big-machine time. Tractors, loaders, telehandlers, forage harvesters, excavators or even a site dumper all demonstrate you can handle scale and long days.
• Show mechanical ability. Oil changes, hydraulic hoses, welding, tyre work and small engine repair are all directly useful and easy to prove.
• Say what you can commit to. Seven weeks of harvest, 14-hour days, a caravan or farm accommodation if the job is away from home, weekends included. Contractors lose more people to the hours than to the machinery.
• Get your C+E licence if you can. It is the single change that moves you from "maybe" to "we can use you" with most contractors.
• Mention farm upbringing if you have one, with hectares and crops. "Raised on a 360-hectare arable and beef farm, helped at every harvest since age 14" is a real qualification.

One page, plain, no photo and no date of birth. Many contractors read applications on a phone in a tractor cab, so keep it simple and easy to scan.

• Put machines, headers and licences in a block near the top rather than hiding them in bullets.
• Give a location and say whether you will travel and how far. Half the hiring question is logistics.
• List your availability dates. "Available from 1 July" is more useful than a general statement.
• Name two referees with phone numbers, or say references are available on request. Farm hiring runs on phone calls between people who know each other.
• Send it as a PDF, and be ready to text or WhatsApp the same file. Some contractors only ever see it on a phone screen.
• If you are applying to a large farming company or a machinery dealer, mirror the advert's words (combine driver, combine operator, harvest operator, agricultural machinery operator) because those adverts do get filtered by software.