Onida, SD – Do you like sports? I find them incredibly boring. About as boring as watching wheat dry in the field (which is all we’ve been doing the past few weeks). I never played any sport ball, but I did run track for a few years in high school. Harvest sometimes feels like an endurance race where you pace yourself for the long road ahead. Other times it’s a sprint to the finish line, with a flurry of activity that leaves you begging for a rain delay. This year our progress in South Dakota is more akin to watching slow motion replays of us tripping over humidity hurdles on the track.
Almost this entire harvest season weather has given us fits, and South Dakota is no exception. Typical hot, windy days have been replaced by cool, dewey mornings. Overcast skies are the norm, and temperatures dip low enough to warranty coats and blankets during the overnight. There has been a chance of rain nearly every day we have been here, and the humidity has been sky high. Storm clouds bubble up every few days, but the rain is hit and miss. Some areas get inches, while others get a shower. It’s not always enough to be beneficial for the fall crops, but it’s always enough to delay harvest. We’ve even found ourself in a flash flood watch while here.
This means harvest is taking forever. Some afternoons the humidity never falls below 70%, and that’s enough to keep us from doing anything those days. In fact, we have never gone out to the field before eating lunch at the trailer houses. When you don’t start your harvest day until 4 PM, you can’t make much progress. By 9 PM the moisture begins to creep up, and it’s time to shut the machines down.
It’s ironic that hot, dry weather was such a concern during the growing season, but now it’s no where to be found during harvest. That weather held back winter wheat yields on most fields. But the spring wheat received more beneficial rains, and it looks like it will outperform most of the winter wheat. We’ve harvested over 70 bps in a few fields, but 50 seems like the more realistic average across the board. Given the extremely dry growing season that seem pretty respectable but certainly not record breaking.
After sitting still waiting for the wheat to ripen, now we’ve grown weary of sitting still watching the wheat dry. Our North Dakota job planted every acre to corn this year, making Onida our last stop for the summer. So for us it is a race to the finish line, but these humidity hurdles keep tripping us up. But slow and steady wins the race, and the crew running down the home stretch of our 2025 wheat harvest season.
