18 Aug Brian: Placing on the podium

Onida, South Dakota — We continue to fight frequent foggy mornings and high humidity as winter wheat harvest slowly drags on in South Dakota. We often can’t start working until mid-afternoon, and by the time the sun begins to set, the damp straw abruptly ends our day. While we wish we were making more progress, it has resulted in a golden opportunity to take part in what many of you have been doing at home each night — watching the Olympic Games.

It never ceases to amaze me how Olympians can compete at peak performance under such pressure. Years of practice and dedication culminate in a competition that’s over in the blink of an eye. It’s a lifetime of relentless preparation that yields winners and losers, often determined by fractional measurements of space and time. Only the very best are invited to stand on the podium for all the world to see, their work rewarded with a medal of achievement.

Perhaps we should consider adding agriculture to the list of Olympic sports. Just like athletes, farmers engage in a marathon of activities each year to prepare the soil for another growing season. Months of hard work spent seeding and tending to crops culminate in that final moment of reward — the harvest. It almost feels like cheating, but somehow custom harvesters get to skip all that hard work. We just show up to participate in the most exciting part, the awards ceremony known as harvest.

And what a rewarding harvesting it has been! With most fields yielding more than 75 bushels, this crop easily has earned a spot on the podium. But we’ve seen yields of more than 100 bushels per acre here, and that’s a gold medal performance rarely achieved. All eyes are now on the ripening spring wheat crop. Can it keep up this amazing winning streak and earn a spot in the record books, too?

Despite the short days and slow progress, it’s been exciting to help farmers realize their Olympic-sized dream of bringing in a bountiful wheat crop. We’ve been breaking records, and we can’t help but feel like we’ve been bringing home the gold. Our reward isn’t a medal that you hang around your neck or display on a shelf. Our reward is that feeling you get when you look out over golden fields of grain rustling in the warm summer wind, stretching as far as the eye can see. It’s the reward of watching the sun transform blue skies into blazing shades of bronze as it slips beyond the horizon, leaving behind silver stars glinting in the darkness as another day of harvest comes to an end. Unlike Olympians, we don’t do this job for a chance to earn a medal or be recognized on a podium. We simply do it for the love of the harvest, and that’s a feeling unlike any other.

Brian Jones can be reached at brian@allaboardharvest.com.

Thank you to our 2024 All Aboard Wheat Harvest sponsors: High Plains Journal, Lumivia by Corteva Agriscience, Unverferth Manufacturing Co., Inc., Merit Auctions, Kramer Seed Farms, Shelbourne Reynolds and U.S. Custom Harvesters, Inc.

Tags:

aawh, agriculture, All Aboard, harvest, High Plains Journal, HPJ, oklahoma, wheat