A Custom Harvester
5/5/202636 min
Harvesting five million bushels of wheat and corn from Texas to Montana, outrunning hailstorms that decimate a year's income in 20 minutes, and running a multimillion-dollar convoy of equipment down the highway with Josh Beckley, a third-generation custom harvester from Kansas. Why do farmers outsource the harvesting of their own crops? And what happens when you drive a combine into a ditch?
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDan Heath· Host0:00
Walk down the bread aisle at your grocery store. An unbroken chain of work made every loaf possible, from the farmer to the millworker to the baker to the delivery truck driver. But there's someone missing in that chain. [gentle music] It's a job you've probably never heard of, the custom harvester.
Josh Beckley· Guest0:22
A lot of the things that you would find in the store and eat, why, they s- have been harvested by me and people that also do what I do.
Dan Heath· Host0:31
Josh Beckley is a third-generation custom harvester. He runs Beckley Harvesting out of Colby, Kansas. Every year, Josh and a crew travel 500 miles south from Kansas to Haskell, Texas. He travels with a caravan of equipment, combines, tractors, trucks.
Josh Beckley· Guest0:52
And then we'll just start harvesting other farmers' crops. And as crops ripen, they ripen from south to north, 'cause it gets warm down there faster, and we'll just harvest other people's crops from Texas to Montana.
Dan Heath· Host1:05
It's called the harvest run.
Josh Beckley· Guest1:08
So on my run last year, I did about, uh, five million bushels. Almost everything that we do in some way, somebody around the world eats somewhere.
Dan Heath· Host1:20
Up next, the invisible work that makes your bread aisle possible.
Unknown speaker1:24
[upbeat music]