YP couple take on US

Melissa and Matt Kenny, Price, recently returned from a trip to the United States where they spent six weeks as part of a 3220-kilometre, eight-month wheat harvest with contract crew JKD Harvest.

Mr Kenny, who grew up helping out at harvest on the family farm, said the trip was always something he wanted to do.

He knew that with their lifestyle and jobs it would be difficult to commit to the full season, but after speaking with the contracting crew the couple negotiated a six-week trip.

They started with the crew in September at Bison, South Dakota, before moving to North Dakota for the wheat harvest that started in May in Texas.

"The day (the crew) started in Texas, the crops in North Dakota that we harvested were getting sown," Mr Kenny said.

"It took an entire growing season to get from Texas to North Dakota."

After the wheat season finished in the north, the crew then moved back down to Kansas to start harvesting corn.

The crew they were working with had five combine harvesters, four-grain carts and nine trucks, and often had all five harvesters working in unison, staggered only by a machine length.

Mrs Kenny had planned to help with catering, but after a few people left the team, she stepped up into a grain carting role.

"I had a quick crash course in how to drive a truck and operate the scales," she said.

With the number of combines in operation, this required some careful thought.

"Number-one had to be emptied at the start of the run as the auger was inaccessible for the whole run," she said.

"Everything they do is weighed through the grain cart with the scales, so I would take from the field only what we needed to load the truck.

"It was all very different to my usual office job."

The terrain was a point of difference for the Kennys, particularly on wheat.

Mrs Kenny said there were places where water rushing through had created undulating terrain with divots.

"Sometimes Matt would have the combine as high as it could go and was only just cutting off the top of the wheat, because of the divots he was driving in," she said

"It was really undulating, beautiful scenery, but a little bit scary at times."

Matt said the work was "very full on", with some long days.

"At home we do harvest for six weeks and are ready for the beach but there they do eight months," he said.

"We covered a lot of country then moved on."

Most of the properties they worked on were for people for whom it was unviable to have their own harvesting machinery - they could have it done by the contracting crew in a matter of days.

In one case, surrounding a centre-pivot, he noticed the farmer was starting to prepare the ground for sowing the day after it was harvested.

"Less than two days after we'd reapt corn, they were seeding the new crop in the same field," he said.