harvest time -- the farmer

harvest time -- the farmer

in his automated combine 
all day into night

Early October, day after day of clear weather, perfect for harvesting the big fields of corn and soybeans. The sound of a combine draws me to the field north of our meadow. An almost impenetrable thicket of wild plum, hedge apples, wild grapes and poison ivy runs along the fence line, but I find a narrow deer path at the corner where the fence ends. A pelt of brown soybean plants still covers most of the acreage, but the ground around the perimeter looks like it's been sheared with clippers.

          Here comes the combine over the hill. It looks like a gigantic insect with a red body perched above a wide row of black teeth. The whirring blades slice off the dry plants, separate the golden beans from the stems and leaves, and spew out a cloud of chaff. Now I can make out the figure of the farmer sitting inside the glass cab.

          At the corner, a few yards from where I'm standing, the machine comes to a stop, the engine shuts down, the maw of teeth lifts up, and the farmer climbs down from the cab. Wearing a blue shirt and blue jeans, he looks very small next to his enormous combine. I'm wondering if something broke, but the farmer walks over to me, smiling, shakes my hand and introduces himself. Though we've been sharing a fence for many years, this is the first time I've met our farmer neighbor.

          Merlin Miller hails from a family of farmers. His father, Dale, owns a farm on Queenscup and his son Eric has a farm on Redwood, just down the road from Merlin. He says they used to farm our meadow, but the area where our house is located was all pasture. He recalls that all of this area, a thousand acres, was inherited by a lady who lives in a big green house over on the highway, but by the time she died, it had all been sold off.

          "Did you get much of a soybean crop this year, with the drought?" I ask.

          "A little thin, but so dry we won't have to dry it. On the other hand, the beans are as hard as rocks and they're breaking the steel teeth on the thresher. I have to replace 10 or 15 a day, so it kind of evens out. We've got 2,200 acres around here, all soybeans this year, but we've got corn over in Van Buren County that did pretty good, 'cause they got more rain."

          "You must have to be pretty optimistic to be a farmer."

          His smile gets bigger. "It's like the Cubs, you know, there's always next year."

          He sweeps his hand along the cleared perimeter and says, "I left plenty of beans for the deer. Do you see many of them?"

          "A few, but they can't eat that much in a big field, can they?"

          "We figure they cost us about $15,000 a year. I've seen herds of 30 or 40 out in the field. Once I found a pair of antlers locked together. And another time I saw where a pair of bucks were fighting, dragging each other this way and that."

          "Are you a hunter?"

          "No, but they sure have increased over the years. When I was young, if we saw a deer, we'd go home and talk about it. Now, if we don't see a deer, it's something to talk about." 
          "I guess they don't have many natural predators left," I say. "All the cougars and most of the coyotes are gone. Now it's just cars and guns." 

          The logo on Merlin's shirt says "Southeast Iowa Diesel" and he tells me that he runs a diesel repair shop, and he also helps his wife with her store in town, "Kim's Kottage."

          "We have a lot of fun," he says.

          I ask him what it's like to harvest with such a big machine. He says his 300 horse power Case cost $300,000 and he trades it in every three years. It has different threshers for corn and beans. "The thing practically runs itself," he says. "The GPS tells it where to go better than I could."

          "So what do you do?"

          "I get on the mike when it's time to unload the beans and Eric meets me with the pickup and hopper. He drives alongside with the hopper under the chute while the combine keeps going."

          Merlin's son, Eric, comes walking up the field from the east, maybe wondering why his father stopped harvesting.

          "I've got to get back to work," Merlin says, shaking my hand again. The two of them confer for a minute and then they both climb into the cab, turn on the engine, lower the thresher and start down the row in a cloud of dust.

          When I go to bed that night, I can still hear the combine buzzing away. By morning the entire field is bare and our cars are completely covered with fine brown dust.