PRAIRIE HARVEST 2024
I want to write a few words on the annual farm harvest and on the quality of the smart teens and youngsters that are such an integral part of the family farm.
There is a quality about harvest which is difficult to communicate to those who have never experienced it. You can read the words and your minds will generate the sounds, smells, and emotions. But unless you were raised on a farm and absorbed the essence of farming it is very difficult to truly experience the full immersion of the annual event called harvest.
The excitement of operating the large complex machinery, the long hours, the critical crop yields which so dictate your income, the dust, the smell of hot machinery, the haze in the air, the color of the light in the golden surroundings, ravenous hunger, hot meals in the field, all the hot coffee you can drink, 11 year old youngsters running grain carts, wives driving combine harvesters, with babes sleeping in the cabs lulled to sleep by the warmth and rumble of the machinery, days stretching into darkness, dust swirling in the lights at midnight to finish a field or beat a rain shower. The mechanical breakdowns, hours of disassembly, driving five hundred miles one way for parts, sleeping in your truck for a couple of hours, driving home with replacement parts and the hours of re-assembly and hoping its fixed. Neighbors who finish harvesting their fields and just drive over to yours with two combines, a grain cart and semi-trailer and help combine your crop without asking, like it’s nothing at all and was just on their way home anyway and won’t accept anything in return, other than a smile and a heartfelt thank-you. A time proven rural farm culture which you don’t see much of in society anymore unless you are a farmer/rancher.
Babies asleep in combine cabs, school children doing homework in tractor cabs of grain carts while listening to the combine operators to call them on the radio as their grain tanks are 3/4 full and will be full by the time you get here. Teenagers doing school assignments in the cab of the IH Eagle semi-trailer while ever vigilant for radio calls. Dad on the radio asking son or daughter which page of the damned combine monitor software was the drop down menu for such and such. The reply is instantaneous; the teens know the software and how to diagnose threshing problems or Internet connection issues. There are no woke male or female pronouns here or old or young, there is just a collective body of knowledge shared over a group of very motivated, focused, hardworking, extremely capable folks who are “doers” not “talkers”.
One of the big jokes of such teens is at 16 years old after driving tractors and grain carts, combines, an IH Eagle semi-tractor with 18 speed manual transmissions hauling a B-train of wheat for the best part of five years they can go and get a “driver’s license”. Yeah right!!
One lass showed up for her drivers “practical exam” with a semi-tractor hauling a B-train and proceeded to show the examiner how to back up the B-train for about as far as you want to go. The examiner watched her do that and float the 18 speed split-shifting and she was “passed” as extremely competent in her driving and operating skills. Got her “driver’s license and also her 1A with air endorsement.
No surprise Oil and Gas Companies are eager to pay top dollar for farm folks as they are completely competent on day one. They can handle the hours, stay till the job is done, can operate anything and do the required maintenance as part of the job without batting an eye. And that’s the 18 year olds, taught how to work, trained on machinery and maintenance and ready and able to make $200k per year.
Corporations like to use fancy terms for their bright young rising employees calling them “Fast Trackers”. Kinda makes me snicker as young folks that grow up in agriculture on farms and ranches have been “fast tracking” since they were born.
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If you enjoy eating you better be thanking a farmer/rancher and wishing them the very best for their safe and bountiful harvest as that’s where our food comes from.
Remember farmer/ranchers, stay out of grain carts, grain semi’s trailers, and grain bins. Every year we lose too many brave souls to suffocation, or grain augers, and know where the kids are at all times, being run over is far too frequent.
Always make time for safety!
Best
Martin E. Silenus