By TIM UNRUH

Salina Journal

HEDVILLE -- As he chugged through a wheat field at 3 mph, Earl Buckley felt the urge to waffle on his plan to retire from custom harvesting.

Then he remembered his age, nearly 80, and the surgery in January to repair a pinched nerve in his back.

"It was hurting a little this morning, but I doctored it up a little, took some Tylenol. It's feeling better now," Buckley said.

Still, there's nothing like sitting at the controls of his old Case IH combine that's "probably an '89" model. He bought it used sometime in the early 1990s.

"I'll miss it, maybe a little," Buckley said as he maneuvered through a golden sea west of Hedville, a wheat field farmed by Terry Trarbach.

This week marks Buckley's 15th year to harvest for Trarbach, and his 50th and last as a custom harvester.

When Trarbach's wheat is safely stored at the Cargill Ag Horizons grain terminal near Salina, Buckley will head back to Northbranch in Jewell County.

"I'll probably cut some around home," Buckley said.

But he's not sure. The two farmers he normally harvests for have quit farming. So Trarbach's wheat could be his last.

Well, maybe.

There's also milo harvest this fall, soybeans, too, Buckley said, but he definitely won't hit the road anymore.

As dust and chaff circled his faded red machine and condensation from the air conditioner dripped down the windshield, Buckley reminisced about a career that took him most summers from Oklahoma, south of Lawton along the Red River on the north Texas border, to Divide County, the northwestern-most county in North Dakota, near the Canadian border.

Buckley boasts a list friends he's made from every stop along the route.

"I still hear from some of them," he said.

The campaign would begin around May 20 and wrap up in North Dakota sometime between Sept. 20 and Oct. 1. He cut fall crops, including corn.

Flax and mustard have also flowed through his combines, also durum wheat.

"That's spaghetti and macaroni wheat," Buckley said.

Buckley ran up to three machines and hired up to four "boys" to help.

A lot of long, hot days

From the end of fall harvest until the wheat is ripe the next spring, Buckley does construction, specializing in steel buildings and pole barns. One of them sits on Trarbach's farmstead.

There were many long, hot days, just like Wednesday when the temperature soared to 97 degrees in Salina, with little wind.

There was shade under some trees off the corner of the field. That's where Buckley's assistant, son Ron, a school teacher from Aurora, Colo., stood Wednesday afternoon to wait for trucks to be loaded.

Earl Buckley normally cuts from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., but he's harvested around the clock a time or two. It all depends on the conditions.

"It makes a difference whether the dew sets in, what the wind does, whether it stays dry," he said.

There was some good wheat in Trarbach's field, but it was a bit uneven as the combine circled the oddly shaped field. Still, the combine bin needed to be unloaded after every round.

Earl turned over the combine controls to his son to make a round. As he stood in the hot sun, more memories surfaced.

A lot of memories

There were the perils of hauling combines and trucks over the road, the narrow one-lane bridges in Oklahoma and those tiny grain elevators that didn't have the capacity to hold a harvest.

If it was too wet to cut wheat, the elevator owner would hire custom cutters to create space by hauling wheat to the terminal elevator in Burkburnett, Texas.

When Earl started traveling in 1959, his combine took a 14-foot swath through the field. Now every pass harvests 24 feet.

He recalled running his combines on propane in 1968 and paying 6 cents a gallon for fuel. Today, he's paying more than $4 a gallon for diesel fuel.

"It's terrible. All I can do is growl, but they don't pay attention to me," Buckley said.

He's charging a lot more to harvest, but the price of wheat is much higher, and the cost to custom harvest -- in wheat -- hasn't changed.

It will take from three to four bushels of wheat an acre to pay for harvesting and hauling, Earl said.

With Ron back from his round on the combine, Earl was ready for a return to his climate-controlled perch. He climbed to the cab and continued his farewell tour.

As he prepared to hit the road with a full load of wheat, Ron Buckley figured this would be his father's last harvest, that Earl will soon park the combine for good.

"I think it's probably about time. He'll be 80 in September. He needs to slow down, retire, but he likes to keep busy," Ron Buckley said.

n Reporter Tim Unruh can be reached at 822-1419 or by e-mail at tunruh@salina.com.