Heading to the finish line

I took this photo one gorgeous morning a couple of weeks ago. The fields ripe-for-harvest looked so golden and beautiful that morning.

Yesterday that cornfield got harvested. It was the last one to go. Here's the combine on the left just after emptying its load into the catch cart on the right.

The loaded cart then heads off to empty into a waiting grain truck.

Here comes the combine, taking 8 rows at a time.

Look at how shiny and clean that corn head is, from getting constantly polished by the corn stalks and leaves.

The rest of the combine is not so clean, after having harvested many, many dusty acres of soybeans and corn. You can see the dust in the air as it heads back into some more rows.

Below is the catch cart emptying into the truck.

And so it went for a few more hours until the field was emptied of its corn. Harvest is now complete for 2014, and the combine is tucked away in the shed for the winter. Hurray!

If you want to see the combine in action, look at the video on last year's post. Noting the date on that post, I see that we finished 6 days earlier this year! It's still not record early by any means, but not record late, either. One year they had to finish in the spring. Yup, it snowed too much too soon. So we're always thankful when we don't have that kind of a harvest season!