Wheat Watch: Season 3 - Harvest Edition

This year's wheat harvest seemed like it took forever.  The best time to harvest wheat is when the humidity is low and the temperature is high.  Typically this isn't a problem in Western Kansas in July.  However, this year we had a little more than a week of cool wet weather right in the middle of harvest.  So what would have taken 12 days ended up taking about three weeks.

The farmers here will tell you that "wheat has 9 lives".  If that's true most of our wheat used about 8.5 of them.  Drought, erratic temperatures, and hail were the reason for most of the wheat attrition.  The funny thing is that there is always one field that stands out and does surprisingly well. 

This was the first year that I wasn't on the combine during harvest.  My new job was to manage the harvest and harvest crew.  So instead of being responsible for one combine, I was responsible for three combines, two grain carts, two semi trucks, and several third party trucking companies.

My first harvest on the farm I told my father-in-law that I had a new job title for him: Manager of Chaos.  I didn't realize how appropriate of a job title that was until this year. 

When harvesting with three combines there is always something that is broke.  So basically my day consisted of running from one combine to the next and fixing things.  It was a lot like juggling; fix a problem throw the combine back into the field and wait for the next one to come back.

When there wasn't a combine to fix there were wheat load tickets and truckers to manage. 

My favorite harvest quote was from a trucker that had just gotten several big loads of wheat and it was the end of the cutting day.  He was from Tennessee so think thick southern accent - "Man.  I'm getting me a shower TONIGHT!"

-Combine Squadron Commander/Assistant Manager of Chaos Ryan
      P.S. - No Dwight. Not Assistant to the manager of Chaos...

Combine Combined

Getting three combines ready for harvest is an interesting kind of chaos.  It is like when you start to clean your basement and you just keep finding more stuff you need to clean.  Only instead of cleaning it's replacing parts and instead of cleaning supplies it's $100 ball bearings other expensive stuff.  So by the time we were done we completely rebuilt the front end of two of our combines. 

When "cleaning" this combine we found a crack in one of the wheels.  So we had to take it off so we could weld it up, and put it back on.

After ordering a ton of parts, then I made it my job to become the parts librarian.  So after some dewy decimation, I had them organized and ready to install.

All in all I think we replaced over 50 ball bearings, 10 chains, 5 belts and a bunch of other things with green paint on them. 

-Combine Part Librarian Ryan