Plains Folk: Harvest Home
By TOM ISERN
© Plains Folk
I'm enjoying a review of the digital photos I took in Barton County in mid-June, images taken to document the wheat harvest. Not a bad harvest, despite the late-spring freeze and the early-summer dry spell. A little rain, a little mud, but reasonable harvest weather.
Some things about wheat harvest remain the same year to year. Betty and Wilma, for instance - my brother's two grain trucks, so named by my two nieces, who reckoned their age was to be measured more in terms of archeology than those of history. I'll grant you the springs busting through the seat-covers are a source of discomfort, but it seems to me those trucks are taking on a certain patina that fits the colors and textures of the plains.
Contrast that with our old friend Marvin Sessler, enjoying a new 30-foot header on his 2388 Axial-Flow. Studying my photo of Marvin on the platform, I'm thinking he has his chest out a little bit, maybe feeling a little pride of ownership that's not exactly Lutheran. That may just be a harvest thing, though; I've seen the same posture by my granddad and grand-uncle in those old yellow albumen photos of harvest a century ago.
Speaking of the axial-flow machines leads me to a couple of observations about how harvest has changed over the past generation. It was 30 years ago I started a study of the history of custom combining as a doctoral dissertation. That led to my first book, "Custom Combining on the Great Plains: A History," in 1981. It surprised the heck out of my publisher by selling out of print, because the custom cutters bought it.
Over the next few years I backed up to look at harvest before combines, which became the book "Bull Threshers and Bindlestiffs: Harvesting and Threshing on the North American Plains." It's the only book I ever wrote that won a national award, and the thing did not sell. Go figure.
I was on the subject, though, of fast combines. When I wrote my first book about wheat harvest, I notice in reviewing it, I was really smart. I had things figured out. I also remember I was fairly fast in those days, had no trouble hustling around the fields getting my photos. This time around, though, I had to reckon with combines with ground speeds of six mph and up, which wore me out. In fact, chasing Marvin's machine across that sandy ground of his, I pulled a hamstring, and thus climbed no more combine ladders on this expedition.
Here's a change that I would not have predicted. The 1970s were the heyday of feminism, when it seemed that all sorts of occupations were going to integrate the genders. Over the past 30 years, however, it seems that the wheat harvest has become more, not less, gender-specific. There are still farm women driving trucks, and some few women working for custom outfits, but overall there are fewer women involved with harvest.
