So now on to the corn harvest saga. You just learned about the sugarbeet harvest, and how they wanted to keep harvesting corn at the same time due to the storm threat from Hurricane Sandy. But they were a person short. Desperate times call for desparate measures, so they called me out of my nice warm office to come help. Fortunately, I keep some coveralls, stocking cap, coat and gloves in my trunk for just this reason. So it was back up into the grain cart again like the past 20 years. It was cold too, so glad I was prepared for once.
So round and round we went for the rest of the afternoon and into evening.. As mentioned previously, there was a spectacular sunset, and I snapped this picture of it. Now I'm not shy about "touching" up a picture after I download it (I love Picasa.) But I swear that I did nothing to edit this picture. This is just as it came out of the camera, and no special effects settings either.
And into the night. Fortunately the scale numbers were lit as you can see in the picture below. And there was enough light to get my grain samples for quality checks. But daytime is better for this if I have a vote.
Since it was dark I did have to check every now and then that we were, in fact, still harvesting corn. We were in this plot anyway.
So after the beet crew finished around 9 pm, they came over to help continue with corn harvest. Some stayed till well after midnight while others left at 9. (I was one of the others.) When it was all over, we had harvested 282 individual plots in a single day. No doubt an NCRS record. And the way it looked this morning, it was a worthwhile effort because it was sleeting and raining and certainly no harvest today. Here I am looking at some of the late night corn plots and the sugarbeet pile.
So now more data to analyze. A nice rainy day project. And while we beat the storm, it appears that many did not. So we are mindful of those who have been affected as the story continues to unfold.
