Harvest

What kind of farmer's wife would I be with out writing a little blog about harvest.  Wheat harvest that is.  If you are not from the area you may not know this but wheat harvest was pretty early this year.  There where a lot of farmers who could start cutting the end of May.  This is virtually unheard of in our area.  We usually are closer to mid to late June, even as late as July 4.  So the end of May is pretty crazy.

We (meaning Cowboy Z and his Uncle... I really have almost nothing to do with it beside cook some food and say things like "look at them cut, Cowgirl KJ see that wheat they are going to put in the grain cart.")  have everything custom cut.  Meaning we hire someone else to harvest our crops.  Combines are very expensive, like $400,000.00 expensive, and we flood irrigate corn.  Now this may not seem like good reasons to you but when you figure the wheat needs to be cut the same time the corn needs furrowed and watered (both pretty labor intensive jobs) you start to see why we hire a custom cut crew to cut it for around $30,000 this harvest.  So while our guys where trying to furrow corn (make trenches in between each row of corn for the water to run though) we had a crew with 3 combines, 1 grain cart, 2 semi grain-trucks,  4 South Dakotan s, 3 South Africans, 3 semi-trucks(to haul the combines), and two 2012 Dodge ram pickups to get around town in, harvesting the wheat.  Dont get me wrong the guys watched them cut and helped get trucks and crew from here  to there, for the most part we let them get the job done.

Unfortauatle I did not take any pictures of the crew cutting except this one of them packing up to leave.  Cowgirl KJ loved seeing the semi-trucks parked out her bedroom window.  She told me last night she missed them parked out there... oh well another harvest in the books.


Oh and if you are wondering we harvested about 50-60 bushels and acre 50 is average on a good year in this part of Kansas.  So we cant complain about how it went.


I know I did not do a good job at explaining what all goes on during harvest, so if you have any questions feel free to leave a comment and I will try to explain it better.

Thanks

TFDW