The wisdom of the corn

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

John Heinz has been doing fieldwork for more than eight decades. He doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon.

It began when he was 10 years old — “when I started plowing corn with a couple of old nags,” John chuckles.

This year, at age 92, he’s using horsepower of a different sort, piloting a nearly new Case IH combine through the rows.

John and his family farm several miles south of Charles City. The family corporation includes John’s son, Scott, and Scott’s wife, Janit. Scott and Janit’s son, Jon, is the “hired hand.”

John also has two daughters, involved in their own farming operations with their husbands.

This year John, his son and his grandson put in 1,654 acres of corn and 365 acres of beans, and John will combine every bit of it, as he has for decades.

A few years back John and Scott also raised cattle.

“We always used to have about 450 head of cattle on hand,” John said. He stopped raising livestock about five years ago during an especially hard winter that he said brought nothing but problems.

“I used to go to the sales barn about every two weeks,” he said. “I’d sell some and I’d buy some, every time.

“One time I came back without buying any. Scott said, ‘What’s going on?’ I said, ‘We’re getting out of cattle.’”

John said his son replied, “That’ll be the day.”

Well, the next trip to the sales barn, John again came back without any new feeder calves. Then he started selling off the equipment — watering tanks, bunker feeders, the manure spreader.

“That convinced him,” John said.

Traveling down the rows of dry corn stalks being pulling into the hungry maw of the model 7230 combine, John knows the field like the back of his well-weathered hands.

The machine bounces a little.

“That’s the tile lines,” he says. “Years later you can still feel them under there.”

The combine’s display panel buzzes.

“I know the bin’s full, you don’t have to tell me,” he talks back to the machine.

“That thing can lie to you, you know,” he said. “This year it’s only been once, but last year it was three or four times it didn’t go off and the bin overflowed.”

John keeps one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the combine’s control handle.

The GPS automation controls they have on this combine aren’t accurate enough for him to trust it to steer itself through rows of corn, he says.

“We’ve got (GPS) in all our tractors now, but sometimes I don’t even turn it on. I like to drive,” he said. “Combining beans you can almost go to sleep. Put it in automatic and go across the fields — you ain’t got nothing to do but sit there.”

John’s grandson, Jon, driving a tractor pulling a grain wagon, comes alongside the combine to let John unload the tank.

“That’s an offbreed,” John says, referring to the blue tractor his grandson is driving.

The family loyalty to red International Harvester, now Case IH, runs deep.

“My dad used to say, ‘If it isn’t red, put it in the damn shed,” John says.

His first memories of harvesting corn involve picking and shucking by hand. He smiles and makes a motion of grabbing an ear, ripping off the husks and tossing it over his shoulder to the imaginary wagon behind his back.

The first mechanical harvesting equipment he used was an Allis Chalmers picker. “We thought we had the world,” he said. He first used a combine on corn in 1968, although beans were a little earlier than that.

John motions over at this grandson pulling the grain wagon alongside.

“He’s the best cart driver that I’ve ever seen. He does a good job. His dad — you don’t know where he’s going,” John laughed. “Either he’s going too damn fast or he’s going too slow — you have to watch him all the time.”

The three-year-old Case IH combine — “we’ve had it two years; it was a holdover” — has an eight-row corn head on it, and John says that’s enough.

“You put a 12 on it and you can’t keep up, keeping the bin emptied,” he said.

John was born in 1925 on a farm near where he was combining Thursday by the intersection of Quail Avenue and 260th Street. “About a mile that way,” he motioned, pointing west.

His parents, Matt and Minnie, had three kids — John and two sisters. Both his siblings are gone now. One was 86, the other 94 when they died.

John had a scare himself several months ago.

“Last winter I didn’t think I was going to be around here,” he said. Pneumonia put him in the hospital for three weeks, with a 104-105-degree fever.

But he recovered and he’s at it again.

Back in the command chair.

Driving the combine. At 92 and counting.