Two combines and a grain cart harvesting wheat.

After many weeks of waiting for just the right conditions, harvest finally came to pass!  Most years it starts in late June or early July, but this year it came mid-July.  Why the hold-up this year. you ask?  Well, we've had a wet year.  Rain while the wheat is growing is great because it helps the wheat produce a big, healthy crop. Big Roy's wheat fields were beautiful, dense with wheat heads that were bigger than usual.  That indicates a good crop.  But wheat can't be harvested until it dries and it dries very slowly when it rains everyday.  If they harvested the wheat too soon and its moisture content was too high then the wheat could spoil.  They know when the moisture is right because they'll cut a sample from a field and take it the grain elevator to test the moisture content - their goal is less than 13.5% moisture. 


The arrival of the harvest crew.  Notice they're pulling their own combine and trailer for grain.

The harvest crew (aka custom cutters) arrived a few days before harvest began.  They're a hired group that "follows harvest" with their own combines and semi-trucks.  They start harvesting at farms in southern states, like Oklahoma or Texas.  Due to the tilt of our planet, seasons pass differently depending on your latitude (north-south), so wheat in southern states will be ready to harvest slightly earlier than their northern neighbors.  That allows them to "follow harvest" from the south to the north. For many farmers it is much cheaper and more efficient to hire a harvest crew than it is to do it all yourself.  Even with the crew at their service, Big Roy and Little Roy were both out in the field everyday on their own machinery working hard.  It's that important to get harvest done quickly in case something were to come along, like a hailstorm, and damage the field before it got cut.  In fact, if they had another combine they'd probably stick me in it if they thought I'd be willing! Harvest takes about a week for our family.  The crew would wait every morning for the humidity to fall a little before they'd get out and going.  Then they'd work until sunset.  This is my third summer living here and I believe I've finally learned to have a little patience because supper can be as late 8 or 9pm.  My stomach just doesn't understand, so I snack, snack, snack until Roy comes home!

Little Roy coming out of the field to meet me.

Combines, like the one above, are used to harvest grains.  They do the combined job that used to be done by multiple machines (reaper,binder, thresher and tractor), hence the name "combine".  They cut the crop, gather it, and thresh it (separates grains from other plant material).  They're expensive pieces of equipment.  A new combine is around $350,000.  On the last day of harvest, Roy invited me to take a ride in the combine with him.  I'm slightly intimidated by large farm machinery, but how could I refuse?  Here are the steps I climbed to enter the cab of the combine.  That top one is just above my head! In the picture below you can see the view from the cab (where we sat) down onto the header (the front part of the combine).   The most prominent part of the header is the reel (looks like an elongated ferris wheel).  The reel goes around to push the wheat into the header so it won't just fall on the ground. You can't see the sickle bar in the picture because the wheat is so dense, but it is just on our side of the reel.  The sickle bar is very sharp and moves back and forth to cut the wheat.  The large auger you see is the cross auger.  It gathers the wheat as it is cut and feeds it into the feeder house, below us.

I found the picture below at "Wheat - the inside story" and it will help explain the rest.  After the wheat enters the feeder house, it goes into the concave where the cylinder bars knock the grain out of the head, separating the grain from the straw (see the threshing drum and beater below).  The grain falls through the concave to the grain sieve and the straw goes up onto the straw walkers (shaking screens) that take it out the back of the machine and drops it onto the ground.  The grain that falls to the sieve has air blown across it with the fan to remove the chaff (lightweight pieces of husk and awn). Grain that falls through the front of the sieve goes up the clean grain elevator into the grain tank.  Any other grain goes through the return grain auger (tailings auger) and back through the cylinder again.   Quite an impressive machine, right?

This is a hard picture to look at because I was taking it through the back window of the cab that was very dirty.  This is the top of the clean grain elevator.  The clean grain is pouring out of it and filling the bin of the combine.  When the combine was ready to unload, the grain covered most of the window! As seen below, the grain is unloaded from the combine into the trailer of a semi (it could go into smaller trucks, too).  These semis carry about 1,000 bushels.  One bushel makes sixty loaves of bread.

Big Roy stands watch as his wheat is loaded into the semi.

Well, that's the end of the exciting harvest.  We celebrated with a big supper and lots of sleep!

P.S. Now that harvest is over, it's almost time to giveaway some wheat berries!