July 22

View of the day-CaseIH ProHarvest makes a visit.

The day started out cloudy and humid...again. Today was the Harvester's Appreciation Breakfast at the Legion building. It ran from 7:30am to 10:30am, we went down around 9:30 and had a breakfast of waffles, scrambled eggs and sausage rounds. They have a guest book that everyone signs as they come in and they said there was over 70 that had come for breakfast. They also said it was like the United Nations, with harvesters from Germany, South Africa, Netherlands, some others too hard to spell and of course, Canada. Tomorrow is the Harvest Appreciation Supper at the Firehouse(the old fire hall converted to bar/steakhouse), cheap steak and free beer.

Heading back to the camper, it started to rain, and it came down pretty good for about five minutes, then the sun struggled out an hour later. This didn't bode well for any chance of combining, especially since it had been so tough yesterday.

We decided to fix the lights on the combine trailer, but the test light was out at the field in the grain truck, so out we went. While we were there we thought...why not do a test just to see where we were at, moisture wise.

ProHarvest had gotten hold of us to let us know someone would be in the area, and would check on our yield and moisture monitor problem. While Al took the sample in to get tested at the elevator, Ray from ProHarvest did a bit of rewiring and then rode along for a while to see that everything was working. Amazing...for a change it wasn't two days and $3000 later...he said, "imagine getting that fixed and it didn't cost you a dime". Yeah...imagine.

We then pulled all the stops out and finally made some dust. The temperature hit 102 and the humidity climbed back up making the humidex 107, certainly not pleasant for the truck driver. We finished off the first 50 acres, then moved over to the adjacent field.

This field had just been broken out last year and was littered with all sizes of rocks and boulders. Fortunately, the rye was tall and the header was cutting 18-24 inches off the ground, missing them by inches, but it was quite a ride when one of the tires would roll over them.

The straw started to get tough and was wrapping on the auger so it was time to quit for the night. The humidity had gotten up to 65% and the temp was still 88 at 9:30pm, when Marilyn got out of the air conditioned cab to tarp the cart for the night the stifling heat took her breath away.

At least we cut a couple loads...