Harvest Home

It’s harvest time, and the weather has been unusually cooperative this year. We’ve had warmer than average temperatures and lower than average precipitation. Lower as in none for the past month, which means the farmers have basically been able to be out in the fields 12+ hours a day, seven days a week if they want.

Last year was an unusually wet fall, to the point where many farmers were just getting started out in the field during the 3rd week of October and had the grain dryers going constantly in order to get the moisture levels down to the required levels in order to store it. Contrast to this year where many farmers are more than 50% complete by this time and they haven’t had to hardly dry any grain.

The kids and I had to go to my parent’s house last week to use their washing machine as ours is currently not working (that’s what we get for buying a used set on CraigsList – hopefully it’s an easy fix). We drove around the farm for a bit and I snapped some pictures.

If the weather holds and they’re able to keep the pace they’ve been going, they can finish up within the next 10-14 days. I can’t ever remember a time when harvest was complete by Halloween. Granted, there’s still plenty of work to do after harvest as far as working ground and machinery upkeep goes, but it’ll be nice to have the main harvest work done.