A Golden Journey

We've been done with wheat harvest for about a month. We're usually done by the end of June, or at least by the Fourth, but this year's weather extended things a bit. Maybe these photos will give you some idea of part of what's involved before you eat that piece of toast for breakfast!

No harvest or planting time would be complete without some repairs to the machinery.
The combine is ready to roll!
A few heads of wheat
can be threshed by hand to get the wheat berries, which make a chewy and tasty (in my opinion) snack.
The reel guides the wheat into the combine
where the straw is separated out, with just the grain ending up in the bin, or hopper, on top of the combine.Then it goes from the combine hopper, through the auger, onto a waiting truck
that hauls it to be stored in bins on the farm
or, it might head down the road to the local grain elevator.
There it is weighed,
sampled,
unloaded either by dumping out the back
or through a door in the bottom of a truck bed,
and then makes its way up to the top of a l-o-n-g leg
where it drops down into a huge storage bin until it is sold and trucked away to be made ready for the grocery stores as pasta, bread, cereal,..... .
This is my favorite photo of the crop.

Kansas wheat--nothing like it!