Students Try Balancing Harvest with School Work

By Jordan Stimpert
Staff writer
IG: @jordanstimpert

School work can be difficult to get on top of, but working during this fall’s busy harvest makes it even more difficult.

Fall harvest mainly consists of both dryland and irrigated corn, soybeans and milo. To some of the students at Hutchinson Community College they may not have any clue what harvest is, but other students balance their school work and classes along with working harvest. There are 40% of full time college students that also work a part time job, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, and only 3% of those students report to be working in the agriculture industry.

There are many students at HutchCC who have an agriculture background, whether it be they worked in agriculture back home, have a farm or ranch, or maybe they’re working in the agricultural field right now.

Kevin Brown, a Yates Center freshman, works on his family farm on the weekends and works for Brenda Schweitzer Mondays through Thursdays. His work day mainly consists of working in the field or doing maintenance. Brown also does various other things while at work. When it comes to Brown’s schedule he has classes earlier in the day and goes to work once he’s done with classes for the day, and he goes home every weekend to help out on the family farm.

Sophomore at HutchCC Elleson Yost, a Greensburg sophomore, works at ADM Grain elevator in Hutchinson. Yost works every weekday after she gets out of class and is on call every third weekend. Her job includes probing samples from rucks that come in, and grading the samples to be placed with their elevator ticket. Most days Yost works till 8 p.m. and does school work after work.

The farming lifestyle is a complete gamble. There is never any telling what might come in the next couple months or if there is going to be rain for your crops. One thing that farmers always wish for is lots of rain while the crops grow, and no rain while it’s time to harvest the crops. But here recently it’s the opposite of what the farmer wants it to be. When it rains during the harvest season farmers are left with not a whole lot to do. They can’t get in the fields because the ground is too wet.

“You just do a bunch when the weather is bad and you can’t be in the field,” Yost said.

Not only farmers slow down with the rain, but the elevators do too. Yost’s first week of work was slow because of the rain, and only transfer trucks or outbound trucks came to the elevator.

Maintenance is a big thing that the farmers do when the fields are wet or before planting and harvest season starts. Tractors always need to be maintained so they are ready to run all day seven days a week. Farmers also need to maintain the equipment they pull with the tractor, whether it be a drill, a planter, a disc or a plow.

There is so much that student farmers do behind the scenes that the common pedestrians don’t see.

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