View from the Tractor Seat

Memories of Harvests Past

Harvest is the best time of the year for a farmer. It is tremendously rewarding to harvest a really good crop and even fun to harvest an average one.

This fall we had had some good corn and some bad. In general, it wasn’t a very good year for corn; just too much water for the ground we farm. Between rain and breakdowns — even our grain elevator broke down — it was a harder than usual harvest.

When I was a boy we harvested corn on the ear with a two-row picker mounted on a tractor, with all of the heat and dirt from the machine blowing right on the driver. My job was to haul the ear corn on funnel wagons from the field and unload it by climbing in the wagon and kicking it out.

We went from there to a two-row picker and sheller to a two-row combine to a four-row to a six-row and now to an eight-row.  

We can now harvest more corn in a day than we could in two weeks and have it all shelled, on a truck and ready for Mr. Perdue’s chickens. I am still hoping for a good soybean crop and am already planning for 2019 so that I can harvest a really good crop.

-Joe Layton