EDITOR’S NOTE: Times-Call reporter Douglas Crowl and photographer Jill P. Mott are exploring the issues facing farmers in a monthly series of articles about agriculture in Weld County.
 

PLATTEVILLE — Gary and Joyce Herman had about 10 minutes Wednesday to wolf down a lunch of skinless broiled chicken and celery sticks while sitting on the tailgate of a truck parked in a half-harvested sugar beet field. “We didn’t always eat like this,” Gary Herman said with a smile, referring their healthful midday meal. Flanked by three tractors, the couple talked about the fattening fast-food cuisine of past harvests.

Gary Herman harvests beets on his farm near Platteville on Friday morning. Times-Call/Jill P. Mott

“It used to be Taco Bell,” Gary said.

It was a brief light moment in what is a stressful and exciting time of year for a farmer: the fall harvest.

Before the conversation ended, a tractor trailer that hauls their newly harvested beets roared into the field, and the driver jumped out to inform the Hermans the beet dump would close at 2 p.m. If they wanted to pile another load into the trailer and haul it off, it was time for Gary and Joyce to get back into the tractors.

But the early closing at the Western Sugar Cooperative beet station, where regional sugar beet growers weigh and drop off their harvest at Weld County roads 13 and 32, is just one challenge the Hermans face.

In another field to the south, they are harvesting corn, which they contracted out to a harvesting outfit.

One of the local corn elevators where the Hermans truck the freshly harvested crop was down, giving the crew a much longer lunch than 10 minutes.

“We are very frustrated right now. There’s a rush going on,” Gary said.

The corn cutting was steady again Thursday, but such is harvest, a time when farmers can depend on only one thing: “Anything can happen,” Gary said.

On Tuesday, a long chain on the beat digger split off the machine and needed to be repaired.

On Thursday, Gary had to fix a gear that went out on the digger.

“This is just keeping everyone happy and keeping the trucks and machines running,” he said.

The Hermans farm about 1,000 acres on plots just south of Platteville. Of that, they’ll harvest about 200 acres of sugar beets and 675 acres of corn beginning this month.

The Hermans are banking on the corn harvest to overcome challenges in the beet fields this year.

A spring hailstorm knocked out most of the newly planted sugar beets. They replanted some fields, but last week they drove the tractors through the green rows of beets knowing they could pull out maybe 40 percent of what they had hoped for.

So despite the hard work at hand in the beet fields, corn is largely on the Hermans’ minds. A good harvest from the cornfields — grown for chicken and cattle feed — will let them cash in on high corn prices and help make up for any sugar beet losses.

Looking south to the brown cornfields Wednesday before finishing lunch, Gary said he was feeling optimistic. But a man who often compares farming to gambling isn’t about to declare success so early in the harvest.

Weeks before, he described his philosophy of farming.

“Until I have the check in my hand, I don’t make predictions,” he said.

Douglas Crowl can be reached at 303-684-5253 or dcrowl@times-call.com.