Kansas Harvest

The winter wheat harvest has arrived here at our farm. The wheat was cut on June 7th this year which is one of the earliest dates that I can remember. With the lack of rain the wheat, what there was of it, matured early and was very short in stature and yield! We got about one half of a normal crop out of it.

Watching the harvest this year brought back many memories for Barbara and I.

Barbara reminisced about the many harvests she particpated in on her family farm while she was growing up. She spoke about the number of people that it took to get the harvest in back then compared to today. She said that they had 14 hired hands for harvest which she had to cook for starting at the age of 13 as her mother worked in the fields along with the men. In fact she was given a special drivers license which allowed her to drive to the grocery store to buy food and back to the farm at age 13!
Now we watch as our farmer and his two sons harvested our farm in about 4 hours. They stopped for dinner which was brought to them by the farmer's wife, who owns funeral homes in the two adjacent towns. She stopped at the burger joint and loaded up on burgers, onion rings and large cokes. What a difference today!


I remember the harvests of 45 years ago as I was working at the local CO-OP. Back then the farmers used small (we thought of them as large) farm trucks to bring in the wheat. They would be lined up for a block trying to get in to get unloaded. To unload them we had them drive the front wheels of the truck unto a hoist and then we lifted up the truck and opened the tail gate to allow the grain to come out. You had to scoop the corners out as they would not drain so it took some time to do all of this. Now they use semi trailer trucks with bottom gates that allow for all of the grain to come out without help from a hot, tired, sweaty worker with a scoop shovel!

You have probably seen the grain cars used by the railroads today. They are purpose built and empty just like the semi trucks I mentioned above. Back when I had to load out a load of wheat it was into a standard box car! The railroad provided us with as many cars as we felt we would need. In each car was a set of Coopering (not sure where the name Cooper came from) material. That consisted of heavy flat steel rib reinforced cardboard and some boards. You would nail the material accross the entire doorway on both sides of the car and leave a little bit open at the top. Also you had to inspect the entire floor and walls to patch any place that might leak on the trip. The next step was to load the wheat in with a chute that you had to direct from side to side trying to fill the car up. Of course you had to scoop it into the corners where the chute could not get the wheat into. After you had it loaded you scrambled out of the space you left for the loading chute and closed the boxcar doors! You can imagine what the person who did this looked like on a hot day with all of the wheat dust!!! Yes, I was that person too many times, and they call those the "good ole days"!

Can you believe that I quit this job to go to college??