The season has arrived when I lace up my work boots, clip a two-way radio to my collar and prepare for my annual mind-reading gig. Some days, my predictions seem as happenstance as the Magic 8-Ball from my childhood.
“Without a doubt,” it would confirm.
I serve as one of our farm’s primary grain-cart operators charged with predicting the combine’s next move. My tractor with an auger cart collects corn and soybeans from the combine, which harvests it and takes the crop to the truck, which in turn hauls it away.
The effort demands a balance between being readily available and out of the way, something like holding a flashlight for Dad’s car repair during childhood. Experience, awareness and a bit of reading the operator’s mind ensure I am positioned in the right place at the right time to relieve a combine of the grain filling its hopper. I cannot be a field length away or on the wrong side of standing crop. Ideally, I position my cart nearby, ready to turn under the combine’s spout and unload on the move while the combine still harvests.
Fall ranks as my favorite time of year, a good thing considering the commitment. If I ever labeled harvest in our smartphone calendars, it would appear as a visible stripe across 45 days from around mid-September to the very end of October. We set a goal to complete harvest by Halloween, my dad’s birthday. Some years, we make it. Sometimes, we eat cake in the field.
Family moments are shared when our kids work in the scale house at our grain facility, where the harvest is weighed and tested. They help Grandma deliver meals to the field, and we carve pumpkins on rainy nights. The kids ride along in the machines where they see generations of family and like-family employees working together.
The oldest ones learn to operate the grain cart and further experience the harvest. Absent any machinery breakdowns (or subpar grain-carting), the process radiates with the energy in its efficiency and its unified effort toward the common goal: Finish as safely and productively as possible.
“You may rely on it.”
About the author: Joanie Stiers farms with her family, growing corn, soybeans, wheat, and hay and raising beef cattle and backyard chickens in west-central Illinois.
