Starting Harvest

It is *officially* harvest!

We started cutting winter wheat on Monday afternoon. That morning, I helped Jeff quite a bit with all the very-last-minute preparations. We cleaned out a grain bin and swept out a truck. I washed all the windows on the combine, even the ones inside the hopper. 

This is what the inside of a grain truck looks like. 

 The sky was a bit broody on Monday, but no storms that night. This year, we grew winter wheat, yellow peas, spring wheat, and barley. After we finish cutting the winter wheat, we'll probably move on to barley, and then finish on spring wheat. We're actually not cutting our peas at all this year, but that's a topic for a separate post.

Each morning, to start the day, the combine is serviced and gassed-up, and the windows are washed. This is just to hopefully maintain smooth operating with this beast of a machine. Daily greasing and cleaning keeps it running as efficiently as possible.

Jeff gets into one of the hard-to-reach places on the combine with a grease gun, while Harvey looks on.

 Also, just because it's harvest doesn't mean that other farm work can be completely neglected. Jeff has been getting up very early every morning to spray while the wind is down. Then, he'll spend a full day on the combine or driving truck. He had been spraying our peas (again, it's a long story for another post, perhaps), and then this morning began spraying the fallow fields. I could probably do an entire post just about spraying-- why we do it, pros and cons, etc. So, that's another one that could be coming down the pike sometime, folks! But this post is about harvest kicking off, so let's continue with that!

I took a break from cleaning the windows and mirrors for a photo op. 

 Harvest is easily the busiest time of year for us. Remember that we spend an entire year planning and working just for this season, to harvest our grain. A significant portion of our income is based solely on how the crop does. I always like to make the analogy that harvest for us is like tax season for an accountant, or like Black Friday in retail. This is when you hope to make it into the black, so to speak.

I'll be doing several more posts as harvest continues on about how it's going, so stay tuned for that. I also want to give a big shout out to my friend Christy. She lives and works on a big beef ranch and dryland farm, similar to our operation only they're bigger on cows and less on crops while we're heavier on crops and less on cows. Christy is a very active member of Team Beef Montana and has a great running blog with many, many followers. We met in person at the Montana Farmer's Union Women's Conference last spring and she stood up during a goal-making session and said she'd like to spend more time on her running blog educating her readers about her farming and ranching lifestyle. She is definitely making her goal a reality! She has a really fantastic post today about her family's wheat harvest, which is also underway, and I highly recommend you check it out: You Like to Eat, Right? Learn A Bit About Your Food!

Golden winter wheat under that big Montana sky!

Happy harvesting, everyone!
If you are a farmer, how does harvest typically go for you?
If you're not a farmer, what would you say is your busiest, most important time of the year?