The 1997 harvest season went
very well, once it got started after an unusually cold, late spring. We
started cutting in north Texas the first week in June, and were lucky enough to
stay ahead of rainy spells through our first stop in Nebraska. Several
times we finished a stop, and got several inches of rain that night. We
cut a "once in a lifetime" bumper crop in northern Oklahoma and got 5
inches of rain on already wet fields the night we finished. We felt
fortunate to be loading, rather than looking at wet wheat and fields.
Especially during wheat harvest, every round matters. In northwest
Nebraska we eventually bumped up against green wheat, but now a few days was
welcome as it gave everyone time to get to the Black Hills and see Mt. Rushmore
and other sites. We especially enjoyed Scottsbluff and a bit of the real
Oregon Trail, an area that we had yet to visit in our many years of harvesting
in western Nebraska.
We had a spell of cool weather in North Dakota that slowed things up; but once it cleared out, harvest was fast and we made it to northern Minnesota on time after all. The corn and soybeans at home struggled through a season of no moisture the first month, to extremely wet the next two months. Even after this, we had average beans and above average yields of corn. The month of October was beautiful weather, except for one freak snow shower, and we again ran 6 combines for fall harvest. We were done early in November, before the first snow that actually stayed on the ground. The guys that had not seen snow before enjoyed it.
