Kortney DeBock – CK DeBock Harvesting
I’ll take my coffee in an IV drip, please.
I claim to be a “together” kind of person. I get my taxes filed in January, meal plan every week down to the last, little ingredient, pick out my clothes the night before and never stray away from what my to-do list and calendar tell me I need to be doing but keeping up with this blog has been a real backseat ride on the struggle bus. Maybe I still feel myself enamored that anybody cares to read summaries of my seemingly boring (ok, that’s not true) days.
Since I last updated, we have moved back to the home base in Texas, like every other harvest post you’ve seen, so I’ll spare you the pictures of our convoy, that everybody else seems to remember to take when making the long trek back down south. Or the pictures of the clean, shiny and just waxed combine. This is mainly due to the fact our combine is still sitting in a field.
Yes, we are into December and still harvesting milo. Every week it seems we pull into our last field of the year, that is until we get another call. No big jobs, just a few small ones that are adding up fast.
When making the 40+ hour drive from North Dakota to Texas, we actually only had one small job lined up for sure. (A wing and a prayer, amiright?) However, I should explain where we live: We are in the panhandle of Texas, COTTON COUNTRY. Grain is not the predominant crop, by a long shot. Apparently, we planted our roots pretty well because the harvesting market here is a vastly overlooked one. Everybody is so worried about planting, watering, replanting, defoliating and eventually harvesting cotton that, I swear to you; they just forget they even planted grain. (Cotton is A LOT of work, y’all.) That’s where we just slide in.
We park our stuff by the house in plain sight, which conveniently sits in the middle of a lot of great farm ground; even better farmers…And wait.
The following is my rendition of what I believe happens next: It doesn’t take long for somebody to do a double take at a Gleaner combine sitting in John Deere country for him to say, “Oh right, I gotta get my stuff out of the ground!” *Calls hired hands to see if they have anybody free to jump on a combine, truck and grain cart for an undisclosed amount of time.* “Shoot, I didn’t even get a chance to get the combine ready for the year. Do I even have a tractor I can pull off a boll buggy? There is rain in the forecast and that cotton REALLY can’t afford to get wet again. I’ll just call those DeBock kids and have them start that smaller field. This will give me time to come up with a game plan to get the rest out myself.” *Fast forward a week* *Man, this is sure nice to focus on cotton while somebody else handles my grain!* “Why don’t you just go ahead and do the rest?” END SCENE.
If you think fall harvest is slow, winter harvest is a dead crawl. You are simply not able to cut all day; every day, like you can in the summer. We got a couple smaller jobs done before we hit a common roadblock you see with milo, it had to freeze before we could do the rest. With an unusually warm fall and no freeze in sight, we decided to start our winter jobs.
Casey opted to work for a local cotton farmer running a the-cotton-plantstripper, giggle all you want, that’s seriously what it’s called. He does that all day and gets off at about 8pm, eats dinner at home and goes to drive a module truck for the cotton gin just down the road.
The module truck Casey drives at night.
My winter job has a bit more lax. I sub for two different school districts, I can usually only work 3-4 days a week and after school I head out to the barns.
After being asked 1,000,000 times, this was just easier.
You see, I decided I didn’t have enough on my plate. I am the proud, yet very, very tired, farmer to 6 goats, 3 pigs, 10 chickens and 2 ridiculously adorable Australian Shepard’s.
My first crop of eggs!
The freeze we had been waiting for finally came, thus the past couple weeks I haven’t been able to work due to all of our fields getting ready at once and Casey still has to strip cotton. So the HarvestHER had to buck up and play lone wolf combine operator/hired hand/farmer communications liaison/general field manager.
I feel terrible guilty saying it, but we finally got a reprieve over the weekend when we got a couple of inches of rain. Casey has been able to catch up on sleep and his projects around the house and I’ve been able to go back to school. Which leads to the opening in my schedule to get this blog finished. I feel like I’ve gone on for long enough, if anybody is even still with me here. I guess this is why I should write more than every 3 months. Ugh. Whatever. See y’all in three months. 
1. Be ready to go at the drop of a hat...sometimes without a lunchbox.
2. Has removed the word impossible from her vocabulary!
3. Can hold a baby, take care of a toddler and drive a tractor or combine all at the same time.
4. Must be able to cook for a crew - large or small.
5. Must be able to read minds.
6. Must be able to banter with a parts man until he realizes you DO know what you're talking about.
7. Must be the entertainment director for those rainy days.
8. Be a wife, mom, friend, helper, cook, problem solver, taxi driver or extra crew hand at all times.
9. Can handle the call that makes you react, "You need what? When?" Dropping everything you're doing to make it happen.
10. At the end of the day say, "I really do love this life".