The Final Numbers: Wheat Harvest 2022

 

I was born during wheat harvest. A rain had taken my dad out of the harvest fields that year, so my arrival didn't even mess with getting the wheat in the bin. 

The photo above was before my recruitment as a truck driver, but I've been taking combine rides for much of my life.

However, through the years, I've had plenty of birthday celebrations right in the midst of harvest, and this year was no exception. 

Before I even had a driver's license, I was helping during harvest, moving the truck closer to the uncut wheat so that my dad didn't waste as much time driving the combine to the truck to dump wheat. This was pre-grain cart days. Or maybe it was just a ploy to get me more comfortable in the truck. At any rate, as soon as I had my learner's permit, I was trucking wheat to the Iuka Co-op.

So it's probably not surprising that one of my favorite Bible verses has something to do with wheat:

John 12: 24

²⁴ Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.  

 It's an "everyday" miracle in farm country, I suppose. We plant the hard kernels of wheat in the fall. 

 

These wheat kernels are "pinkish" because they were treated with insecticide.

 

We watch the green sprouts stand "at attention" like miniature soldiers in the brown earth ...

 ... and then become a green blanket.

 

We marvel when snow and ice don't kill the miraculous plants - even though we've seen it again and again.

 

 

 

And then we watch as the warmer temperatures of spring waken the sleeping crop and green heads begin filling with plump, soft berries. 

 

Then comes the rustle of golden wheat ...

 

 

 

... which gives way to the roar of the combine, chopping its way through fields and separating wheat from chaff. (There are Bible verses about that process, too.)

 

 

We have been planning for retirement for several years, and it was Randy's intent all along to "go out with a bang," planting the majority of our crop acres to wheat for our final summer harvest. As it turned out, the "big bang" harvest was last year - the best of our farming career.

 

 

 

This year's overall average was 34 bushels per acre. We had a high of 46 bushels per acre, and a low yield of 19 bushels per acre. That's what happens when you have a dry winter and spring. 

 

It's always interesting to see how start and end dates compare from year to year. Here are the stats since I began blogging:

2010:  June 18
2011:  June 10
2012:  May 26 (an anomaly and the earliest harvest, by far, we've ever had)
2013:  June 21
2014:  June 17
2015:  June 20
2016:  June 15
2017:  June 12
2018: June 12
2019: June 26
2020: June 16

2021: June 17 

2022: June 13 

 

 

The finish dates are all over the board in the past dozen years, too:

2010: June 25

2011: June 20

2012: June 9 (an anomaly)

2013: July 6

2014: July 7

2015: July 1

2016: July 13

2017: June 28

2018: June 29

2019: July 22

2020: July 7

2021: July 12

2022: June 28

June 25, 2022

Yield averages in the years since I've been blogging have been:

2010: 37.2 bu/acre

2011: 36.7 bu/acre

2012: 45.5 bu/acre

2013: 52 bu/acre

2014: 24.5 bu/acre

2015: 50 bu/acre

2016: 48.5 bu/acre

2017: 50.84 bu/acre

2018: 39.2 bu/acre

2019: 23.6 bu/acre

2020: 49.5 bu/acre

2021: 58 bu/acre

2022: 34 bu/acre

As I said earlier, 2021 was our best year ever. Though our average was 58 bushels/acre in 2021, our high yield was 86 bushels per acre. Our low was 31 - just a smidge under our overall average this year.

We had about 1,900 acres planted to wheat this year. We harvested 1,300 ourselves - from June 13 to 28 (with rain delays interspersed). We had about 600 acres of our crop custom harvested. Three combines going all at once can go over acres quickly. 

Next wheat harvest, God willing, we'll still be living in the same house, down the same dirt road. I imagine that if I want to get out in a wheat field to take photos, our neighbors or tenant farmers won't mind too much. 

But it will be different. However - like Vincent Van Gogh - I imagine I'll always find poetry in a wheat field (as long as my ankles aren't itching too badly.)

The wheat field has ...poetry; it is like a memory of something one has once seen. We can only make our pictures speak.

Vincent Van Gogh 

 

“If you stand in a wheat field at this time of year, ... it’s not hard to imagine you’re looking at something out of mythology: all this golden sunlight brought down to earth, captured in kernels of gold, and rendered fit for mortals to eat. But, of course, this is no myth at all, just the plain miraculous fact.” 

 Michael Pollan

American journalist

This Is Us: An Overhead Glimpse of Harvest 2022

Thanks to our neighbor, Mark Pike, for these drone images and his permission to share them. What a gift!

***

Just like 6.4 million other people, I watched the series finale of a family television drama called "This Is Us" at the end of May. Just by watching my Facebook feed, I know I'm not the only viewer who had a Kleenex box nearby as I watched the finale episode about a family we all got to know and care about during six seasons of Tuesday nights.

I'm not sure how many people then scoured the internet to find quotes from the episode. But there was at least one. (That was easier than starting and stopping the DVR for me to take notes. And since I found a compilation of "This Is Us" quotes, I'm fairly confident that I'm not the only one.)

In it, the mom, Rebecca, is traveling on the metaphorical train toward death after suffering from dementia for several years. And I was struck by the words from her "conductor," William:

"The way I see it, if something makes you sad when it ends, it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening. Truth be told, I always felt it a bit lazy to just think of the world as sad, because so much of it is. Because everything ends. Everything dies. But if you step back, if you step back and look at the whole picture, if you're brave enough to allow yourself the gift of a really wide perspective, if you do that, you'll see that the end is not sad, Rebecca. It's just the start of the next incredibly beautiful thing." 

William to Rebecca, This Is Us, series finale

I saved the quote (and a few others). And I thought about it again when our neighbor, Mark Pike, sent some drone photos he'd taken of our harvest - our final one as active producers.

Undoubtedly, the drone gives that wide perspective - a little bigger picture than I'm able to see with my normal "boots-on-the-ground" view through my camera lens.

 

For some reason, the drone pictures - and that different look at harvest - had me pulling out the Kleenex box again.

 

 

Through the years, I've tried to document harvest to the best of my ability. Since I began Kim's County Line in 2010, I've made an even more concentrated effort, but the efforts to photographically show and tell the journey of wheat - beginning to end- have been part of my DNA for long before then.

I've taken some spectacular shots - and a whole lot that weren't noteworthy at all. But, for some reason, these photos taken from a bird's eye view were particularly poignant. 

"The way I see it, if something makes you sad when it ends, it must have been pretty wonderful when it was happening."

 

That bears repeating, I suppose. But I also know this process is a little like childbirth. The mom develops a bit of amnesia about the rigors of the birth process itself. Otherwise, the whole world would be single children - or so the joke goes.

 

So, as I look back on 41+ years of farming with Randy (and a lifetime for both of us before that), I have a tendency to remember the good - the rides in the buddy seat on the combine, my book in my hand after the conversation was exhausted. ... The wildlife making a hasty retreat as the mighty machine takes another swath of field ... The vibrant green peeking through brown soil, a yearly miracle. ... The dewy raindrops caught on green wheat. ...The sound of wheat, rustling in the Kansas breeze. God's masterpiece sunsets sinking into the western horizon as the combine rumbles toward it and seems to gobble up the light. And so much more.

You don't wax nostalgic about yet another trip to the parts counter or the third flat tire in a week or your legs sticking to the plastic seat of the truck or the buckets of sweat. You realize that you're not bounding up the steps of the combine like you did when you were that teenaged truck driver. You aren't thrilled with the rash you develop during harvest or the pesky cheat that gets stuck in your socks. You don't fondly remember those phone calls to hire a Caterpillar to come pull both the combine and the tractor out of mud - and the accompanying bill. While Harvest 2022 was pretty smooth sailing the first week, perhaps I needed a reality check - and got one. We had a rain delay, and, when we got up and running again after a day and a half, I got the call that I needed to come help get the truck pulled out. (Plus, since we hadn't used the tractor for awhile, it had to be jumped before it could do its job. Mission accomplished - but it was a circuitous route.)

But those moments of aggravation don't take away from the life and lifestyle that we've lived and loved. It's not for everyone. We didn't do it perfectly. I'd change some things.

But, a bird's eye view helps me remember that it was - and is - a beautiful life. 

Toward the truck, that field finished

 

In another quote from "This Is Us," Dad Jack tells his kids:

“That’s what we’re doing, just collecting these little moments. We don’t recognize them when we’re in them because we’re too busy looking forward. But then we spend the rest of our lives looking back trying to remember them, trying to be back inside them.” 

 

So I find myself doing a bit of that. I think it's natural, as we change directions.

Mark also included a drone photo of Randy's folks' house. It sold on June 4, and a new family will begin building a life and making memories there, beginning in mid-August.

 

I just hope they'll look back - years from now - and have those moments to collect and remember, too. 

And, as for us, we may get done with wheat harvest today, after getting rained out yesterday again. Then it will be time to get things ready for the farm sale coming August 13. 

And, hopefully, just like William told Rebecca: "It's just the start of the next incredibly beautiful thing." 

***

Mark shot drone footage two harvests ago. He didn't send any video from this harvest, but here are some repeats of 2020 videos

.  

 

I actually got a pretty awesome still shot from that 2020 harvest night, too. The sky was breathtaking. I enlarged this one to canvas size.

Harvest 2020

A shot I got Saturday night, June 25, reminded me of that one. 

Harvest 2022

For more from the post about the 2020 harvest, click HERE. And, thanks again to Mark!

From Planting to Harvest: A Review in Photos

June 21, 2022

 

Back in September, during planting, I began documenting our 2022 wheat crop.

September 2021

We began planting wheat on September 21, 2021, so I decided to use the 21st of every month to take a photo at the same location and post it to my blog and Facebook.

I patterned the concept after Hudson Cream Flour's Facebook page. ("Patterned" sounds better than "copied." Thanks for the idea, Tabra!) During the last growing season, Stafford County Flour Mills posted a monthly update on the wheat crop to its Facebook page. The mill - which is located in Hudson, Kansas, in our home county - produces Hudson Cream Flour. (It's the best flour there is, if you need a testimonial. They also have a Hudson Cream Flour Baking page on Facebook. Check it out, too!) They did similar reports in 2022. 

I decided to take my photos on the same day, mainly so I'd remember each month.

My June 21st shot at the same location revealed a stubble field. We harvested that field during the first week of harvest.

Here's a recap of the photos, without having to go back to each individual blog post. (Click on the photo collage to make it bigger.)

Since I always took the monthly photo on the 21st, it didn't reveal the whole story. Here's one from January 26, when we got a little snow on the crop.

We began our harvest the evening of June 13, and we are about halfway done. We had a stretch of long, hot cutting days but were halted when we got 0.25" of rain Tuesday evening. It didn't dry off during the day yesterday, and we got another 1.10" last night.

During many of those days, we had clear blue skies, with no clouds. But, as an amateur photographer, you always hope for a little drama in the sky to offset that beautiful golden wheat.

Father's Day provided some fluffy clouds for some photogenic shots.

Speaking of photogenic, that storm that rolled through on Tuesday evening provided plenty of drama, including a rope cloud that I captured in a panoramic shot.

The sky provided a free show. A brief shower had moved through about 5:45 PM, dropping a few sprinkles, and then quickly moved on. 

Still, the dramatic blue sky to the east was a startling contrast to the sunshine behind the weather system. It made for pretty photos as I delivered supper to the field.

We thought that was the extent of the weather, but just 30 to 45 minutes later, another system rolled though. 

We watched as the rope cloud developed from the west/southwest.

It constantly evolved as it moved across the plains.

My final panoramic shot was just as the cloud was about to go over me. I made my way back to the car, and then Randy called from the combine to get picked up as the rain began to fall. There was quite a dust storm as I drove a mile over to pick him up.

After more than a week of hot harvest weather, it appears that we'll be dodging raindrops for awhile. We have a custom cutting crew scheduled to come and help us finish. We'll see when we close the chapter on Wheat Harvest 2022.