Amber waves of grain

Glen Jones began on the wheat harvest in 1983. He had a good truck and a good combine. He saw what other custom harvesters were doing in places like Kansas and didn’t see any reason why he couldn’t be a part of that.

Joined by his father-in-law, George, Jones went to Kansas that summer with one job. Now, his entire extended family spends more than two months of the year on the wheat harvest traveling the entire upper Midwest. That first summer, with only one job in Mineola, Kansas, has led to much, much more.

“When we left that summer, we only had one job,” Jones remembers. “It has kept going. On that first trip, we also found a job in Grandfield, Oklahoma, for a man I cut 20 years for.”

Jones Harvesting has kept many of its stops along the wheat harvest for many years. Some of their clientele have either retired or passed away. Of the approximately 3,000 crews who embark on the wheat run each year, some are small outfits where farmers with just one combine help a farmer or two harvest while others are much larger. Jones knows one man, for instance, who owns 70 combines, leasing half of them and using the rest for his own operation.

Many crews employ workers from overseas who specialize in operating combines. That makes Jones Harvesting, which is entirely a family business, a unique group.

“When I was in high school, that’s really when I started to run the combine more as a full-time type of thing,” said Brian Jones, Glen’s son. “I lived in Omaha for 10 years while I went to college and now I’ve had the opportunity to be back here for 10 years at home. My role has been to take over some of the machinery roles. Obviously, the technology has changed dramatically and plays a much bigger role now.”

Brian and his brother-in-law, Cameron Hamer, who is married to Brian’s sister Brenda, are usually on the front lines of the process of preparing the machinery each summer for the wheat run. They say there’s more than 100 tires that need checked. In all, their convoy consists of two semi trucks that haul combines, two campers that are pulled by pickups, a service truck and two 35-foot draper heads.

One of the fastest moving technologies farmers have used in recent years is all the precision capabilities machinery has. It’s all in the name of getting the most yield out of every acre in the most efficient ways possible.

“How you operate the combine has changed. We’ve sure seen a lot of changes in combine technology, how much we can do in a day’s time and their capabilities,” Brian said. “This summer we have a new combine. We went to the factory and saw that machine being built and that’s always a fun experience to actually see that built before your eyes when you know you’ll spend such a long period of time in that machine.”

On the wheat run itself, Brian will almost exclusively operate one of the combines. He says because wheat is the earliest harvest of the growing season, wheat harvesters oftentimes get to try out new technologies in equipment before anyone else.

“This year’s technology will be the first implementation of cameras inside the machine. There are two high-definition cameras that are live streaming in real time and using photo recognition so that the machine can understand what it’s seeing. It’s able to determine what adjustments need made so that you can improve the cleanliness of the sample or the productivity of the machine,” Brian said. “That’s all happening in the background using a variety of technologies simultaneously with little to no interaction from you as the operator whatsoever.”

Early on in their marriage, Cameron and Brenda were living in Dunning, Nebraska, where Cameron was a teacher and Brenda ran a hair salon, as she does now out of her home in Adair County. The guys would go on the wheat run and she would go visit them for periods of time throughout the summer, keeping the hair salon open as she could. Now, she puts her business on hold for the summer and the entire family travels together.

“For the first 28 years or so, I hired two drivers for every summer. Most of the time, they were college students,” Glen said. “I recruited at Bible colleges because I had a family on the road and I figured it was easier to teach you to drive than to change morals. They could come to work when they got out of college and I made sure they were back to college in time for that even if we weren’t quite done yet.”

One of those college students who saw an advertisement for a truck driver for Jones Harvesting was Cameron, before he had even met Brenda.

“I tried to get on the wheat run, and I knew Brian but I didn’t know that Glen was Brian’s dad,” Cameron said. “I called up and didn’t have a CDL at the time, and I think the timing was a little tight for me to get that.”

Fast forward several years and Cameron and Brenda have four children who are on the wheat harvest with them — Titus, 10; Ezra, 7; Judah, 4, and Caanan, 2. There is a total of 10 people who travel with Jones Harvesting on their adventure that usually begins earlier than this in Thomas, Oklahoma, and ends up in North Dakota in early August.

Brenda and the boys may need to return to Greenfield if the harvest isn’t over before school begins this year. It was because of a drought that they weren’t able to start as early as they normally do in Oklahoma. Glen says he has spent the Fourth of July in a handful of places, and it’s all dependent on the weather.

“I think there are parts of things the boys miss from not being home in the summer, but now that we’re gearing up for harvest, I think every one of them has said they’re excited to get going,” Brenda said. “Titus is 10 now, so he’s more excited to help in the field now, learning how to fuel and start to do some tasks, getting in on more of the actual work than just staying in the trailers and playing all the time.”

Cameron agrees, saying that his children getting to go on the wheat harvest allows them to have a unique and closer relationship with some of their relatives than other children may have.

“Obviously, my kids have a different relationship with their grandparents than most kids would, being with them, their uncle Brian and their great uncle David,” Cameron said. “I think that’s one of the things that Brenda and Brian both experienced, that their grandpa went on the wheat run with them and they got to live and spend time with their grandfather, and I think that was a huge [experience].”