Harvest

The past several years during harvest I work for John, a local farmer. My job is to drive his "auger wagon". When he as a hopper full on the combine, I drive along side while he unloads corn or beans from the combine on-the-go. Then I transfer the grain into wagons or a semi that will head to the elevator. This photo was after John had finished a field and we are actually parked.

This year was a good one for corn in Central Illinois. 200 bushels per acre and more. Some areas were much more. This auger wagon has a capacity of over 1000 bushels although we normally would put about 950 bushels in before transferring to the semi. That figures out to about 26+ tons of corn. The wagon weighs about 12+ tons so fully loaded we're pulling almost 40 tons across the field. We'd harvest a semi load in about 30 minutes.
Seeing any wildlife is somewhat rare other than an occasional field mouse or rabbit. Pheasants, once plentiful locally are a real rarity. I did see 4 deer this year and one coyote that came in and out of the standing corn on a couple of occasions to see what was going on. He was in no hurry so I shot several photos. Here is one as he was leaving the scene.