We spent the last two days as scavengers. We gathered up all of the buckets, barrels, and shovels we could find and headed out through the cornfields to find gold. Golden corn that is, left from the spillage that commonly takes place when a combine auger doesn’t quite line up with a grain truck during harvest. Tractors are crawling all over these hills in our corner of the country, local elevators have the small towns in a buzz of traffic they only see once a year, and grain is literally flowing from the fields to the storage bins and beyond.
It’s an exciting time for us horse people. One reason I love harvest time is that it opens up more miles for me to ride. Crops reign over all the land here, and every square inch that is tillable is used for farming, leaving only roads and waterways left un-plowed. So most of the year I stick to the dirt roads for my pleasure riding, which gets a little boring and sometimes the rocks are hard on my horses’ feet, as well. But once the crops are out, the fields are mine! A vacant soybean field is the best place for schooling a horse—the ground has an even softness to it, padded by bean stubble and clean for loping through. And you can travel for miles without rocks underfoot.
And another reason to give thanks for harvest is sitting in our shed right now. We have filled every bucket and barrel with corn that we didn’t have to pay for. The farmers don’t really want to take the time to stop and pick up spillage, but it’s valuable to us. A neighbor told us about a big spill about a mile from our farm, so we took the tractor out yesterday and scooped corn into its loader bucket and took it back to our place. The wagon we store grain in for our cattle is half full, and there is plenty of corn for my horses to enjoy, too! Corn is great for putting some fat on a horse, and with winter coming, I like to feed a little grain every night. Corn can make a horse overly “hot”, and sometimes a well-behaved horse will turn ornery if he’s getting too much corn. But I think just a little is perfect for keeping a horse well-balanced through the winter.
Here are a few photos from our adventure:
Dad and the kids driving the tractor.
The big spill took us two trips with the tractor loader bucket and several smaller buckets.
Here’s corn we picked up the day before in my brother-in-law’s field. There were also lots of unpicked ears lying around the field, so we picked up a bunch of them as well. The horses love munching the kernels off the cob.
Storing the corn in the feed shed:
Toby could hear corn going into buckets and stood by the gate nickering and begging for us to share some with him:
I love it that we could spend the afternoon together as a family, doing something profitable for us and our horses that didn’t cost a penny. The deer probably had big plans for that corn, but there’s still plenty out there for them to find. Our scavenger hunt is just one more reason to love fall.
