Farmers get that sinking feeling

Harvest this year for many farmers is more like a mud race than combining.

Several areas in the province dealt with higher than average rainfall this summer, and harvest is behind the five-year-average. Farmers are using sweat and shrewdness to slog through their work.

"It's like combining on a big sponge," Al Kuntz told Blue Sky host Garth Materie.

It's like combining on a big sponge.- Al Kuntz, Saskatchewan custom combiner

Kuntz and his wife are custom combiners from the Yorkton area. They travel the countryside doing harvest work, and when there's time after a long day, they gather stories for their blog.

Lately, Kuntz has been combining in the Kipling area. Kuntz says there were a couple of days where they were getting stuck fourtimes a day. He says the wet spots weren't where he thought they would be. The top of the ground looked dry and stable.

"It's really bizarre,"Kuntzsaid. "You'd think it should be wet because you're around a slough. But then you get up on kind of on the side of a hill and your combine would almost just start sliding because the water table is extremely high."

"It's incredible. Where you get pulled out from there's water just inside your tracks where you broke through that top ten inches of crust in the field."

Kuntz says the farmer he was working for had a 500 horsepower tractor with four big tracks, instead of wheels. That piece of equipment came to his rescue time and time again. Each time the tractor pulled him out, he hoped for the best.

"Heaven forbid, you could pull a combine apart. When you hook 500-plus-horsepower to the back, something's gonna move," said Kuntz. "You hope it's the whole thing."

After getting his combine stuck 8 times, Kuntz said, he knew they had to come up with another plan. So they put an extra set of wheels on the combine, called duals, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.

This year, some farmers have taken the unusual step of putting triple wheels on their combines. Many have invested in tracks for their combines and grain carts instead of wheels, so they can avoid getting stuck.

Kuntz has managed to keep his optimism.

"My theory is, I think I'm having a bad day, but there's probably about five billion people who would trade my problem in an instant for their problems."