New TV show Harvest

Watched part of it last nite till I fell a sleep.

Got a Question for you wheat guys out west.

Why if you have a 1000 acres of wheat would you not own your own combine rather than paying and waiting on someone to pay $35 an acre to combine?

I assume they think they need to get it all cut in one day.

I don't know?

Here in the corn belt everyone or most everyone has there own combine if they have over 2 or 300 acres.

Gary

I have my own machines but a lot of guys in the area where the show is at cutting has a lot of bad storms and like they showed you can lose it all in a very short time, the man who lost 10,000 acres at once that had to hurt yes he had insurance but still was far from what he would have gotten had the crop been cut, and the custom job is totally deductable, and a new machine cost is prorated through out several years and a lot of them do not have the man power to run the crews it would take , don't get me wrong I know I like doing my own work and I do custom work too, but with as many acres as some of these guys run I can see the benifits of going with a fleet of new machines to bring in the crop too ,,, my thoughts cnt

Yeah, you do need to get wheat cut in a day. Wheat ain't "safe" til it's in the bin. One guy working by himself could maybe cut 50 acres a day. That's gonna take him 20 days. I'd hire it done.

I was told by a fellow that used to farm in Kansas and raised dryland wheat that the economics don't justify it. His example was 3000 acres and 20 bushel per acre @ $3.00/ bushel. Start plugging in larger numbers for any of the three variables and you may get an answer that is different.
Of course as you mentioned with the fleet effect that once the fleet is there the 3000 acres get banged off in a hurry versus one guy going with a 30 foot header. The wheat would be sprouted before that single guy finished his 3000 acres with one machine. I was told by the same fellow that dryland wheat was one crop where farmers did not gamble in terms of crop insurance. It must be that those guys put claims in fairly often. Those guys would probably be hurting if the federal government got out of subsidizing the crop insurance program.

Then you need trucks, then you have to hire people to operate everything.

What did you guys think of the show?? I was pretty disappointed but not surprised. I'm going to get pretty depressed if all they do is show storms and breakdowns.

It's like Ice Road Truckers, every week they tell you somebody's going to crash through the ice or go over a cliff..... then they just drive trucks. They could film that show in Wisconsin in the wintertime and save alot of money.

I haven't watched IRT since about the third episode and I can see Harvest suffering the same fate.

where is this show on?

One rain can take 62lb wheat and turn it into 58lb wheat, drowned out spots ,sprout damage, shatter, and then of course hail. All reasons to have it hired. In our area it almost always rains about the time wheat is ready plus 2 or 3 days. We own our own machine but have a shellbourne head to help speed up process.neibor owns 2 9760 deeres but hire about half his done.Paul

Gary, if you take into account of having to have fairly new multiple machines plus hired operators (big problem, don't want to turn over a 250K bine to a newby) and the possibility of crop loss/damage add in fuel, repairs and depreciation, yea you can justify getting a custom crew in.

Rick

thursday nights on history channel, next week looks like a field they are cutting catches fire, got to admire the guy who bought ten new Case machines this year, wow!!! two million invested makes my skin crawl thinking about it

When the crop is ready how can you justify possibly wating 2-3 weeks on a custome operator to get to you? Have your own machine and start when it is ready and you will be done before that custom harvester gets close to being ready for you.

Hope this isn't considered as a double post, but I put the same thing in the combine board.
I'm going to hold my opinion for a few more episodes. But yeah they did try to turn some things into a drama. But then again who would want to watch combines go in circles for a hour on TV?
I went on the harvest in 1972 with a custom cutter from Manchester, Okla. He had 6 MF 510's and 8 bobtail trucks. So I can say something for certain....we never had time to stand around and play some kind of game. If we weren't cutting, we was greasing, cleaning, repairing or something even if it was raining.
If the moisture stayed down, there was times we ran 48 hours or more straight. And other interesting times, like moving 10 miles to another field on the highway at 2oam.
I was young and stupid then but enjoyed just about every minute of it. But would I do it again? No dang way Jose!!!

You can justify about anything. Most of the big boys here want to impress their landlords by getting done before anyone else. Matter of greed. Weather? We cut for 9 continuous days this past wheat harvest without a weather interuption. Cut with one machine, one grain cart and one truck. Everyone has crop insurance so getting rained out is no biggie. We have way too many "insurance farmers" these days. Neighbor planted thousands of acres of soybeans in wheat stubble this summer (double crop) and didn't harvest a single acre.
Maybe if I was in their shoes I would feel differently.

Can't answer your question, but..........I watched a few minutes last night. I found it very similiar to the other so-called reality shows; Deadliest Catch, Ax Men, Swamp People, etc. BORING!!! They NEVER answer any of the questions I would ask; how deep you fishing? what kind of bait? how does the trap work? what kind of engine's in that thing? what kind of saws you running? why? I could watch any of 'em for a couple of hours if they were made as documentaries; instead, it's about (non-existent) rivalries and pesonality conflicts.

My farming experience may have had maybe 175 acres on the largest farm that was tillable. down to 45.

I can only imagine on those Massive fields the toll it would take on equipment just tilling, planting and haying.

I think it would be easy to justify newer equipment and hired help so the workload would more evenly distributed, maybe saving a little extra time for repairs needed for next season.

Some of the idea of these type shows is for the stress of the situation to be transfered to the viewers to give it some excitment. I watched Harvest and it was boring. Some poor guy owing a fortune on equipment and being late for his next job is not exciting to me at all. However Shoot the ALLIGATOR ELIZABETH-- now thats cool.

i watched some, switching off with the baseball game.
i'm attempting to mud out the last few acres of corn silage, so i can get the pile capped before it starts to spoil. after the constant harvest "crises" on the tv show, even to the point of loading the combine on the trailer, i decided i had enough "crisis" of my own to think about, and turned it off.

Wonder how long it would take me to cut a 1000 acres with my little MH 35 SP (if it was working).....

thats why when you get farther north they windrow every thing so you dont have to worry about the weather.

Amen to that. The nonsense that makes up TV shows today is stupid. They cant get a good show produced so they video tape guys cutting trees, fishing, etc.
The old cop shows were decent, Hawaii 5-0, Kojak, Then of course Gunsmoke, The Rifleman.
I dont watch any TV, I am on the computer mostly.

Didn't watch the show- are you sure it was a 1000 acre place? Those guys generally have their own combines. Its the 3000 acre + guys who hire it done- because it takes multiple combines and a fleet of trucks, and all those hired guys, to get it off in time- and you can't just go out and hire 6 or 7 competent guys to do a 2 week job.

With huge tillage eqiuipment and a much longer "window", they can still do their own (minimum) tillage and planting, but have gotten too big for a one combine show.

What happened with the neighbor? Run out of moisture, or run out of time?

That's my thought on the whole thing. A whole crew comes in,gets the job done,no muss,no fuss.

That right there is another problem with this show.When have you ever seen a storm destroy 10,000 acres of a crop?You might have a strip of that bad hail,or maybe a good sized patch of it,but its rare that you would see 10,000 acres all in one place destroyed by hail everywhere so bad you cant combine it.I think they tried on the whole show to hype everything about it.
When the truck blew up and they were crying about how much they were going to loose,well they could go buy a straight truck like that for less than 10,000 dollars maybe less than 5000 dollars if they looked hard.I guess after spending 250,000 each for combines they cant afford tractor trailers.
Id hate to think a Louisville Ford straight truck from the 70s or 80s maybe with a diesel engine, would cost so much that it would break a big operator like that!Besides that why not yank that engine out and put another one in?Plus the guy with the older New Holland was having trouble with it shutting down.What did he do the 200 days he wasnt on the harvest?The guys I know that have combines spend a couple of months working on them in the summer usually so that stuff doesnt happen.
Plus they acted like they were going to speed up the combines I guess when they were saying they needed to go faster,to hurry up and knock the last 100 acres out.The combine is only going to run so fast,and it doesnt care if there is a tornado in the next county or not.Like they would go faster somehow and do more.Some of them didnt even have tractor trailers so with those big machines how were they going to do any more?Either they must have a short haul to the elevator or a whole bunch of trucks they didnt show.Actually I dont see how they could even get the trucks unloaded fast enough to keep the combines running,no matter how fast they ran the combine,looks like they would be waiting all the time on trucks.

If you want to read about the reality of Custom Harvesters search for the website "allaboardharvest"

If you follow back through the earlier postings it will take you back through the blogs of several crews of custom harvester’s beginning with the start of the 2011 wheat harvest.

Real life here, not made up TV drama.

Gary,Guys,, My F-I-L for a good bit of his adult life had his crops Custom Harvested. Irrigated and Dry ground Wheat, and Irrigated Corn/Milo. His thought was this better to have your entire season of crop harvested in a hand full of days, than to get strung out for a protracted amount of days, have the crop fall/lodge or loose grain quality to extended wet periods. Like the Milo harvest of 1971/72 (in the TX/OK Panhandles) when it got wet up in the fall, and stayed wet. Farmers were harvesting @ Midnight to 3:00am (only time the ground was froze hard enough to support the combines) Milo harvest finely finished up up in late Fed to mid March!
Anyway his thought back then was the cost of ownership/ repairs of a combine were about equal to the cost of Custom Harvest and Less mental stress getting it knocked out in short order,
OBTW... My F-I-L's Custom Harvester has the place next to his so getting him it get his crop knocked out was not a real problem!
Later,
John A.

(quoted from post at 08:01:03 10/14/11) My farming experience may have had maybe 175 acres on the largest farm that was tillable. down to 45.

I can only imagine on those Massive fields the toll it would take on equipment just tilling, planting and haying.

I think it would be easy to justify newer equipment and hired help so the workload would more evenly distributed, maybe saving a little extra time for repairs needed for next season.

Click to expand...

Problem with hiring is you want experienced operators when the equipment starts at 200K. If every large farmer hired guys to cover all the field work plus the equipment they would sure put a dent in the unemployment thing......but who's going to take a seasonal job that pays maybe 2 months a years? Lot of the big guys can hire a few men but having enough for harvest is an issue. Custom guys get 4-5 months if they start down south and work their way north. and if they have good enough operators/drivers pay enough and let collect unemployment off season. Good running crews require 1 truck per combine unless they are using semi's. When I did it years ago we were using JD 7700s. We had to have one tandum truck per combine. We ran 3 and 3 and with the boss had a 7 man crew. We started in nothern OK and finished near Fargo ND. So you can reduce that by 1 man. The farmers we harvested for had thier men running tractors running right behind us to get the tillage work done. We did one guys wheat in ND who was running over 17 thousand acres in the early 70's. Just looked online for acres per hour on the larger machines, they are claiming 20-30 per hour. So a guy ageraging 20 per hours with wheat at 1000 acres planted will have to run that combine figuring 10 hours a day that it isn't too tuff for 5 days. Lot of them big guys are pushing 20-40 thusand acers. So say the guy has 10,000 acres of wheat, now harvest time is 50 days with one combine. And that isn't stopping to go unload a truck!

Read the crop insurance contracts. Every insurance contract (thats what your policy is a contract) requires that the insured takes/makes every reasonable effort to protect the insured item from loss or damaged. That means they can reduce payment or refuse to pay if you don't make every reasonable effort to get the crop out! You are not covered if you don't have operators or the equipment unless you hire it out. Then it's the custom crews or weather to blame if it isn't out in time. You are covered agains wind, rain, flooding, hail, freeze, vandals, theft and fire. You are not covered if you neglect to get the crop out because of lack of equipment or operators.

Rick

got agree with you on the whole 10,000 acres seems a little streched for sure, they are sure adding drama to a point, and on the truck problem wouldn't ya think you might have a spare or two with that much to do??, maybe its cty folk doing the editing, and real life problems seem dull to them?, one more note I caught was how thet said you could have your leg cut off by the cutterbar, know don't get me wrong I want no part of the header belts you name it when running things would/can get ugly but come on how the heck do you get a 6-12 around leg into a 2" sickle??

The per acre costs are similar (I was friends with a custom harvester that operated from texas to alberta every year) the combine becomes very well known and all replacement parts that will fail are on hand. They make a very good living by being ahead of maintenance, having contracts, traveling in one direction, and doing it all from opening the field to the last grain in the bin or elevator. The farmer just has no worries that would accompany the ownership and maintenance of a whole raft of equipment, and it is done in short order. Jim

I like the part when the truck left the field loaded, and "dropped a valve" in the motor. Next scene they show another forage truck pulling the brokendown Mysteriously NOW EMPTY truck with a tow strap. Amazing!

Good old Dale. I had that experience. I'll never forget it.

I was kind of looking forward to it, but 30 seconds in I realized it would be just as bad as Ax Men or IRT. Why don't they make it more informative? The producers could have shown the general public something most people will never experience, but instead chose to make it an exxagerated contest with a bunch of ornery-acting people complaining about losing money at nearly every turn. If we in agriculture want to help the rest of the population understand what we do, we need to put our best foot forward and avoid focusing on the negatives. In producing food, we do some really great things with mother nature and technology- why ruin it all with a bunch of cursing and conflict? I've personally never run on a harvest crew, but am responsible for raising crops and livestock, and in my opinion, we in production agriculture were done a disservice last night on the History Channel.

LonM

I used to have my hay baled by custom cutters and by the time they got to my place the hay was on the ground and was hardly worth baling. I got my own equipment and I am glad that I did. Now i can bale when it is ready. Roy

I watched a modern marvels episode called "harvesting" once.

They had so many facts wrong it makes you wonder if it was produced by a cable news channel. (not naming any names)


They were trying to explain in depth about how a combine works, explaining the straw walkers they said, "These thousands of sharp knives chop at the stalks to release the the grain."

Now, I could be wrong, because all my combines are old, but, i have laid on top of the straw walkers and those "thousands of sharp knives" were pretty dull and not very "knife-like." They were more like serrated steel carriers that allow the straw to move only one way through the machine. And yes, while the straw walkers on a combine do separate out the last bit of grain, they aren't chopping at anything, and at that point, the bulk of the grain has been removed first by the cylinder and second, by the raddle. Well, the raddle conveys more than separates, but it does even teh grain out along the width of the raddle so that it falls more evenly into the cleaning shoe, which does the bulk of the final cleaning. At no time in my life would I ever suggest that the straw walkers are chopping anything.

So, even with a "documentary-like" show about the actual process of harvesting, they still can't get anything right. They didn't even get the cylinder right. It made me very upset at the time.


I had hihg hopes for this show, and I guarantee you I was blinded when I watched it the first time, merely by the fact that I wasn't paying much attention to the talking, just staring blankly at the new combines.

It makes you wonder who the target audience is for this show. Is it supposed to teach anything? I thought history was considered the "classroom channel?" I know for a fact that they get facts completely wrong on Ax Men, because I do know quite a bit about felling trees for lumber, bucking, and yarding/grading trees. When I hear some of the stuff they say, I cringe.

I will continue to watch, but, I can't wait until I can email a producer or someone about this show and let them know what I feel.