Re: Combine drivers

Posted by rockyridgefarm on May 10, 2020 at 02:46:59 from (96.61.191.22):

In Reply to: Combine drivers posted by smalltowner on May 09, 2020 at 08:19:22:

It is funny how guys on here can have it so figured out. What they got figured out sometimes makes me scratch my head...

I ran with a crew out of Scott city in 2000. It was the first year the STS combines were out. Deere spent a lot of time chasing us and tweaking our two STSs. The boss had split the crew with his son running the STSs and the boss running 4 conventionals. The boss was fair but ran a stricter crew, the son was more permissive and his crew took advantage of it. I started on bosses a crew but got transferred to the sons crew in trade for the troublemakers.

Anyway, we all ended up back together in Hamer and Dubois Idaho. The "farm" had 25000 acres of wheat and split it between two custom cutters and his own rigs. the other cutter was almost all Australians and New Zealanders. We were cutting 120 bushel wheat in what was basically desert. All pivots. 50 feet off the end of the pivot was scrub brush. The west was on fire that year, so just about every day was so Smokey you could barely see to the end of the field. The one day it clear, you could see the mountains. We ran every day sunup to sundown. Other places we had sometimes shown up before the wheat was ready and would have a few days to screw off. We spent a week or two in Ogalolla Nebraska cutting about 50 at a shot then getting the rest of the day off. Not Idaho.

Our crew was three of us from Wisconsin, a pair from Maryland, guy from Missouri, guy from Illinois, guy from eastern Kansas, boss, bosses son, bosses wife. I forget where some of the others came from. Only about five of us made it to the end. Boss likes to hire outta Wisconsin because we had all grown up on a dairy farm and knew how to wake up early. Not so much the case anymore.

Boss had said he regularly turned down married guys who wanted to bring their wives along. He said this was a single guys job. So yeah, those out of work airplane builders with a wife and kids probably are not as willing as you think to abandon their family and run off and cut wheat for five months. And the cutter crews are not likely willing to hire them because they could quit at any moment to go home if their factory fires back up.

I am sure that hiring foreigners is very appealing to cutters. The workers have invested a lot of time and money to come here and have to work in order to pay off their investment. They cannot just drop out and go home because home is 12000 miles away. It is basically indentured servitude. Wisconsin Dells is pretty much entirely staffed by foreigners from any country you can think of. Noah s ark waterpark even has their home country printed on their name tags. Why hire locals at a fair wage when you can import indentured servants who cannot easily go home?

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