Kicking Off The 2021 Great American Wheat Harvest

welcome to texas it's time to kick off the great american wheat harvest for 2021. well it looks ready wow look at all those combines running together in one field [Music] when you're running combine and have that view over there that's just pretty awesome that's almost as awesome as watching that mike west guy on youtube that is one good looking tractor and drain cart hello youtube it is farmhand mike bringing you probably the first of many wheat harvest videos for the summer of 2021. i am down in the burke burnett texas area out in the field with pablo harvesting out of worthington minnesota this is the kickoff of their custom harvest down here for a farm and they brought their eight case international 8250 combines all with macdon fd 145 draper heads you're also going to see a john deere 9770 sts combine in this video that belongs to the farmer himself so he's out here cutting with the custom crew so you're going to see nine combines running in the same field and papa also brought their three magnum tractors pulling the grain carts to keep up with all the combines so the wheat harvest here in north central texas is getting off to a slow start as this area has been getting a lot of rain and delaying the harvest lots of custom harvest crews have been down here setting for weeks winter wheat harvest down here normally starts somewhere between mid-may to the 1st of june and custom harvest crews come from all over the united states and canada to harvest the wheat crop and they follow the wheat crop as it ripens to the north the big great american wheat harvest will start down here in this area north central texas from say wichita falls well over past vernon texas and so forth and as the wheat crop ripens they'll follow the harvest north all the way up to north dakota and even in the canada i was working down this way so i decided to spend the weekend here to get all the wheat harvest footage i could for youtube well the weather didn't cooperate with anybody but i did get a little bit of footage so i started out here on friday afternoon june 4th with paplo harvesting and they thought they were going to be in full swing by the time i got here in the afternoon i got here about 3 30 4 o'clock they had to move fields you seen the mud there where they was gathering up the combines and moving on come out here to cut some test samples and the moisture was still almost 16 percent here they waited a little bit did a couple other samples and by 6 30 the moisture in the wheat was getting down enough that they could actually harvest ideally they don't want to harvest any wheat to haul to the elevator above 13 and a half to 14 by 6 30 in the evening the test sample was showing the wheat was down to 12.9 percent so they had all nine combines out here running and they knocked out this field pretty quick now i know there's going to be a lot of comments and questions in this video so i'm going to try to explain this the best i can normally these custom crews will start down in this area but they don't necessarily run all their combines together in the same field however this is the first job of the season uh they're not going to split the crew up yet they got a lot of new operators here so it's good to keep everybody together for training and so forth and a lot of people are probably going to be wondering why they're not cutting this field out just going around and around in a square and if you look closely they're cutting contours here there's a lot of terraces down in this part of the world to prevent erosion when these guys get rain down here they normally don't get these nice soaking rains like we get back home if they get two or three inches of rain they normally get it all at once so the terraces in the field help prevent erosion and stop all that water from rushing off causing flash flooding so the coal mines are going to come in here they're going to follow these terraces around and cut them so you're going to see this video all the combines are going to be split up as they follow the terraces and cut different sections out of the field another thing i get a lot of comments on is the wheat yields down here people look at this crop and say that field doesn't look very good so another thing i would like to explain is this is all winter wheat down here and a lot of these farms down here grow this wheat mostly for grazing cattle on they'll tell you they actually make their money grazing cattle on this over the winter time then come march when it looks like it starts growing good again and it's going to make something they'll pull the cattle off of it and let it grow for grain so a lot of times you're going to see yields down here in that 30 35 bushel an acre spot and so forth and these guys do not get the rainfall a lot of times like we do up in the midwest in the corn belt if you drive these areas of north central texas up in oklahoma and even parts of southern kansas in the winter time you're going to see these green winter wheat fields but there's going to be cattle out there grazing on them these guys tell me they've been down here for almost two weeks and they've been waiting on the weather to get started they had a good day of cutting the day before i got here of course there's been a lot of humidity down here because of all the rain and that's delaying the harvest a lot of these crews are needing to move north but they got to finish their jobs down here in the weekend i was down here they got a lot more rain had a lot of humidity and there was very little weak cut in texas i did get some more footage you're gonna see in some future videos where i had to go up into oklahoma a little bit while we were waiting on the wheat to dry i got to talk to a lot of the guys here and there's guys on this crew from all over the united states they had one member on the team that was from virginia a couple guys out of the state of new york montana all over the midwest a lot of these custom crews are going to work their way north as the wheat ripens and they're going to go all the way up to north dakota some of the crews do go into western canada some of the crews will jump the rockies and actually go over into idaho oregon and washington to pick up some custom wheat harvest over there then when the wheat is all done and harvested a lot of these crews will come back south and they'll harvest fall crops such as corn soybeans sunflowers and so on if you're looking for an adventure of a lifetime a lot of these custom crews are always hiring a lot of them have a facebook page you can go into the help wanted in a farm magazine and so forth and often get a job with one of these as a combine operator truck driver grain cart operator whichever you choose [Applause] so [Applause] and while we were waiting for the wheat to dry supper was catered to the field which is pretty common out here a lot of these crews will have a cook on staff and they'll pack their lunch and then suppers normally hauled to the field and tonight they had ham mashed potatoes corn dinner rolls and everything was just pretty good check this out i went last but it was good and that's when they got the news that the wheat was dry and off they went cut also need to mention the three tractors in the video are all case international magnum 340s pulling three different grain carts you're gonna see an elmer's hallmaster 1300 grain cart a brent 1396 grand cart and a demco 1322 grain card and as you have probably already seen these guys have a pretty nice fleet of semi trucks this field was my first encounter mosquitoes for the summer of 2021 however i didn't run into any wild hogs or rattlesnakes that's a good thing i've been down here plenty of times for wheat harvest and it starts getting towards evening and the hogs will come out of the brush into the wheat fields i'm also told the rattlesnakes down here don't rattle anymore because the hogs will go after them and eat them and the wild hog can be awful destructive on cropland around 5 30 p.m the second sample we come back is too wet they really thought they were done for the evening they lined all the combines up as you see here dinner was served on the back of that truck you see and that's when they got the good news to go cut and off they went so for the rest of the video you're gonna see all the combines tractors and grain carts turned loose so so so so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so so so so [Music] so so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] then [Music] so so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] normally a custom harvest crew would not be running all their machines this tight together in such a small space but they were just closing down on the last corner of this field and everyone joined in for this great drone shot you see here so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] so they did get this field all done right before dark got all the machines lined up for this great photo op here and who knows i may run across these guys later on in the summer in another state harvesting wheat [Music] that's gonna do it for this video i hope everyone enjoyed it feel free to hit that like button and comment below if you're new to the channel not a subscriber please consider subscribing to my channel if you want more information on what's going on with the wheat harvest here a good website to go to is all aboard harvest or you can check them out on facebook all aboard wheat harvest and you can follow the crews as they move north and harvest the wheat across the great plains of america paplo harvesting is one of the correspondence on that so definitely check it out they also have a facebook page papaw harvesting to keep up with what they're doing anyways remember you can also find me on instagram facebook and tick talk at farmhandmike as always thanks for watching and supporting my 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Channel: Mike Less - Farmhand Mike

Views: 576,635

Keywords: 2021 Wheat Harvest, Wheat Harvest 2021, Texas Wheat Harvest, wheat, harvest, harvesting, custom harvest crew, Case IH Combine, MacDon Draper Head, Case IH AFS Magnum, farm equipment, cutting wheat in Texas, farm, farmer, farming, ag, Agriculture, farm video, harvest video, Mike Less, Farmhand Mike, best wheat harvest video, Elmers, Grain Cart, Peterbilt Semi, Burkburnett, Iowa Park, Texas, harvesting wheat 2021, John Deere, Worthington Minnesota

Id: AV6AnsusUVw

Length: 33min 33sec (2013 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 11 2021