Staff writer
Dwight Kruse and his son, Jason, were harvesting corn Thursday on bottom ground near the Cottonwood River just west of Marion. The two men work together, but each one owns and rents separate acres and owns separate equipment.
Dwight said he enjoys working with his son.
“We complement one another,” he said. “I have a bad leg, so he does things that I can’t do. I’m not a rich man by any means, but I have helped him financially in the past.”
At planting time, Dwight runs the tractor and Jason fills the planter.
Jason said working together with his father has its ups and downs. He acknowledged it’s hard for a young man to get started on his own, and he was thankful for his father’s help. He gradually is accumulating more equipment and more land.
On Thursday, he was operating a 1688 Case International with a 200-bushel grain bin and six-row header. His father was running a tractor and grain cart that allowed them to unload the grain on the go. Dwight’s grandson, Trevor Kruse, usually hauls the grain to the elevator, but he was in school. Joe Tajchman of Marion was operating the truck.
Jason Kruse ran the header close to the ground to get under downed corn stalks and grab as many ears as possible. He said the Sept. 1 storm caused many of the brittle, drought-stricken corn stalks to break.
“Thankfully, the ears were still attached to the stalks, so we could get most of them,” he said.
He planned to turn cattle out later on to eat the remaining fodder.
Kruse said a shorter season corn on an upland field, farther from the creek, had yielded 100 bushels per acre.
“I was happy with that for this year,” he said.