A Different Kind of Deadline: Take a Ride With Me!

Writers know about deadlines. I think, in most cases, even unpubbed authors give themselves deadlines. I do.

Yesterday, here on the farm, we faced a deadline of our own: Beat the rain.

It's a deadline we've dealt with a lot this harvest season. Actually, we dealt with it most of planting season too. This has been, by far, the wackiest year in Northwest Ohio that I can remember.

So, with the weather radar showing a huge blob of green slowly making it's way toward us, we headed out to the field to get as much done as possible. Normally, I work in my office during the day, but when things are hectic, I'm glad to help out in the fields. My husband was harvesting a field that we have to cross what is called a 'low flow' to get to. Basically, it's a fancy word for a place in a ditch that a vehicle can cross. It looks like this:

Yep. That's my Expedition. I took this picture while sitting in the combine.
The reason we wanted to get this particular field finished before the rain is because this small trickle of water:

Would no longer be a trickle after it began raining. And even once the water cleared out, it would be a muddy mess. Since rain is predicted for 40 days and 40 nights--kidding! But we did have a lot of rain in our forecast, so we decided this field was a priority.

The hubs crossed the low flow in the combine and started shelling corn. For those of you who've never ridden in a combine before, it looks just like this:

When the hopper is full, the corn is dumped into a wagon:

Sometimes we use our trucks--in this case (above), the load was light, and my Expedition could handle it. In other cases (below) we string 3 wagons together, and a tractor is needed to pull them. We also have a semi, but since we had to drive through the low flow, using the semi was not ideal.

And then we unload the grain:

The grain goes down into the pit, and an auger pulls it away, then up the grain leg and into what we call the drying bin. The heating system dries the grain while stirring it, and then the system transfers it into a storage bin when it's dry.

Here's part of the heating system. It gives us a read out of the corn moisture and temp every five minutes.

So, that's a somewhat typical day on our farm. Hope you enjoyed working with me!