Getting Corn in the Bins

You’ve heard the joke “How many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” with all its variations. But how about the farmer version of that - “How many people does it take to get one bushel of corn into a corn bin?” 

The simple answer would be a lot. If you ask our farm crew on a late night harvesting, their answer would probably be “not enough.” 

When it comes to harvest, we don’t know the exact answer to the joke, but what we do know is these 3 things:

Things don’t always work out the way you plan.

Harvest is a race against nature. When planting our crops, we stagger planting fields by the week and record dates so that we know which fields to expect to be ready first. Ideally, the timeline works so that we harvest at a pace created by our plant schedule, with a few fields harvested a week to keep things steady. But sometimes nature has other plans. If it rains all week, and corn is sopping wet in the field, we can’t harvest. Then suddenly we are behind by a week and so on. Time & nature stops for nothing. 

It takes a team of people to keep a farm going.

Someone’s in the combine. Someone’s hauling a full trailer to the grain bins. They pass someone else bringing an empty trailer back to the field. Someone’s manning the scales and the dump pit. Someone’s eyeing the moisture levels on the dryer. Someone is receiving the corn bushels into our bin inventory. It takes a team with a simple but meaningful goal: Let’s get this corn out of the fields and into the grain bins. Actually, the goal may be even simpler than that: Let’s just get this done!

There’s no better feeling than a bountiful harvest.

Our crops are in the field during the hottest time of the year. Their growing season is demanding. The harvest is demanding physically on everyone involved. But there is no better feeling than knowing that little by little and, acre by acre, the crops we grew from seed have become a surplus of crops. By the end of a growing season, we are tired, but there is no better feeling than a bountiful harvest. It’s always busy around the farm, but there’s something special about saying harvest is done. 

The saying is true: “you reap what you sow.” We are both blessed and proud to have a harvest and say “We did it,” and will keep doing it again and again.