Harvesting Crews Hustle to Bring in Wheat Crop Hit by Drought, Late Rains

SHARON SPRINGS, Kan.—Rows of wheat fall like waves under the combine Laura Haffner drives in a 320-acre field in far west Kansas, leaving stalks stripped of kernels in its wake. 

It is among the most bountiful fields Haffner has cut in a harvest season marred by a yearslong drought expected to produce a historically poor wheat crop in the nation’s breadbasket. 

Downpours in May through July have revived a few flagging fields and nourished crops such as corn, sorghum and soybeans that will be harvested in the fall. 

But the rain has also slowed harvesters—seasonal crews that travel through the heartland each summer and early fall as they follow the maturation of crops. Harvesters have typically moved out of Kansas to cut wheat ripening north in Colorado and South Dakota by mid-July. 

Some are losing out on business as they hustle to make up for lost time. About 60% of the winter wheat in Kansas had been harvested as of July 10, down from more than 90% at the same time last year. 

“They have begun harvest in central South Dakota already,” harvester Brian Jones said. “That’s a major issue as there is no way to get to our Nebraska stop in between.”

“A year to remember for all the wrong reasons,” he said.

Laura and Ryan Haffner and Jones are custom harvesters, part of a shrinking industry that links U.S. wheat fields to flour mills that process grain into bread that ends up on grocery-store shelves. Each May, a procession of harvest crews and their combines set off from Oklahoma or Texas to cut wheat, following south-to-north routes that have been trod by generations of harvesters. The U.S. Custom Harvesters association estimates there are about 650 harvesters in the U.S.

The profession holds an allure for some—the chance to travel with a group, the big machinery, the sight of shimmering fields—but it is a financially risky business dependent on weather. Unlike farmers, harvesters don’t have insurance to cushion the blow of a lackluster harvest. Many deals are still sealed with just a handshake.  

Harvesting is time-sensitive: Wheat in north-central Texas typically ripens in May, Kansas in June, South Dakota in July. Harvesters must be there to cut it as soon as it is ready.

Wait too long, and a wheat field could be pelted by hail that destroys it, fall prey to diseases, or have kernels that dry up. Too much moisture, though, and it might be rejected at grain elevators. 

“Crops will literally go bad,” Ryan Haffner said. “They’ll either fall on the ground or sprout. They can just rot.”

Delays can become a customer-relations problem for harvesters, said Greg Doering,

“How do you manage a customer whose field is ready to be cut,” he said, when “you’re several hundred miles away and still have days and days of work before you get to them?” 

The Haffners are planning to divide their 18-person crew, sending some to Colorado and others to Montana to make up for the delays caused by rain and wheat that has been slow to mature in southern states.

They regularly harvest well into the night. Ryan Haffner said the geographic spread of their customers, where one state could have a fruitful harvest while their neighbor has poor weather, offers some stability for harvesters. 

Jones’s crew is smaller so it doesn’t make sense to split it up. After warning their customers in Nebraska of the delays, they have decided to skip the state because about one-third of the acres they harvest in the summer are in South Dakota. 

They so far have encountered few fields that benefited from summer moisture; most have been relatively sparse, Jones said. 

“That automatically means significantly reduced income for the acres we do harvest with the low yield. Not to be all doom and gloom but to be blunt,” he said, “I think most harvesters will agree this year is proving to be one of the most disappointing and challenging harvests in the [past] 15 years.”

Kansas is the country’s top producer of winter wheat. The U.S. was expected in May to produce 514 million bushels of hard red winter wheat—used in bread—the lowest output since the late 1950s. That forecast has increased to 577 million bushels, which is still historically low.

Some families have worked in custom harvesting for generations. They can recall busy journeys north, with crews camping out in towns, and local grocers and restaurant owners staying open late to accommodate them. 

The industry has gotten smaller as increasingly advanced and expensive technology has made it harder to break in. 

Agriculture overall has become more consolidated in recent decades. The number of U.S. farms dropped to two million in 2022, from 6.8 million in 1935.  

Jaime “J.C.” Schemper, a former president of the U.S. Custom Harvesters association, said the industry could become more corporate, driving harvesters out of business. 

“These big farms have big machinery, they harvest their own crops, they plant their own crops, they have the same set of labor for both,” he said. “Maybe the need for harvesters isn’t there anymore.”

An estimated three to four harvesters leave the industry each year, said Schemper, whose family has been harvesting since 1959.

The number of acres of wheat planted in the U.S. also has fallen from 88 million in 1981 to 46 million in 2022, as the incentives to plant corn and soybeans for biofuels have grown and more drought-resistant varieties of the crops are developed. 

The Haffners opened their custom harvesting business in 2012, acquiring machinery and a crew from a harvester Ryan Haffner had worked for as a teenager. Initially, they worked only in Colorado. Hoping to expand, they printed out 100 fliers and left them in every cafe and grain elevator they could find on a drive between Kansas and Canada. 

Their crew members this year include men from South Africa, the U.K., Australia and an 18-year-old heading to college in Kansas. They live in RVs and eat meals together in the fields, and they banter on the radios in their combines and grain carts, which are tractor-towed trailers that run alongside the combines, receiving freshly cut wheat before ferrying it off the field. 

The custom-harvesting industry has become more reliant on international workers coming through the H-2A visa program, as some harvesters struggle to recruit domestically because of the seasonal nature of the job and low local unemployment rates. Hiring through the program is more costly, because wages are set by the government and the employers cover airfare, lodging and other expenses, harvesters said.

Laura Haffner said she appreciated that her and Ryan Haffner’s elementary-school-aged children are exposed to other countries and cultures as they travel with their parents for parts of the harvest. They played by the fields as she operated the combine near Sharon Springs.

Her head swiveled left to right as she drove.

“I’m making sure that I’m getting all the grain,” she said. “I don’t want to leave even a tiny little strip.”

Write to Shannon Najmabadi at [email protected]