Meals in the field and hats in combines: A look at end-of-harvest traditions

The end of harvest is a special but stressful time in Saskatchewan.

For farmers, it’s the busiest season of the year, a time when a full spring and summer’s worth of work culminate in the final push to get the crops out of the field and into the bin before the snow starts to fly.

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Worries about pests, disease, yields, moisture levels, inclement weather, malfunctioning equipment and field fires can finally come off a farmer’s shoulders for a few months before they do it all over again.

As the final swipes of the crop are taken off the field, a lot of farm families have traditions they follow to celebrate the end of harvest, often right there in the field. During a busy harvest season, it gives the crew in the fields a chance to stop being coworkers and just be a family.

For my family in the Wilkie area, one of our end-of-harvest traditions was always a meal in the field. On the last field of harvest, my mom and grandma would put together a feast for my dad, brothers, uncle and farmhands in the field. They’d pack everything in sealed heat-safe containers and wrap them up tight to make sure nothing spilled out on the bumpy gravel roads, then load it up in the truck with some plastic chairs and a table to set up a family supper in the field.

As mom and grandma pulled up into the field, grain trucks and combines would gather around and suddenly a noisy field that was alive with the sounds of combines threshing and grain truck engines was quiet as the dust settled. The table was set up for everyone to eat, with the endgate of a truck serving as a buffet table, and under the purples and oranges of a Saskatchewan harvest sunset we’d all relax for a few moments and enjoy a meal together, with the only interruption coming from the odd neighbour driving by and giving us a honk along the way.

For the Horner family near Blaine Lake, meals in the field have been a way to celebrate a number of different occasions. Sometimes it’s to mark the end of harvest, other times it’s birthdays, and sometimes Vera Horner even prepared a Thanksgiving feast to bring out to the field.

Since their family typically had the big meal in the middle of the day, preparations for Thanksgiving in the field had to start the day before.

“There weren’t too many times I had to actually do a turkey dinner, but when I did it I was up early with the turkey in the oven and probably had the pumpkin pie made the day before and mashed potatoes and gravy,” Horner said.

“It wasn’t really elaborate, but it had all the food that comes with Thanksgiving, all in pots and on the endgate. So yeah, it was – let’s put it this way – it was hectic.”

Horner and her husband Robert are now great grandparents, and last year they celebrated Robert’s birthday with a meal in the field that included guests from 10 months to 79 years old gathering together around the idle farm machinery.

“There are a few times when if we are in an area where we’re close to a grid road, somebody driving by might even pop by and end up enjoying some of the meal too,” Horner said.

“We’ve had times where we’ve had up to 20 people eating with relatives or friends or whatever. So it’s become a real tradition in our family.”

The Horners also practice another tradition that’s common among Saskatchewan farmers: tossing a hat into their combine on the last pass of the year.

Robert Horner is the third of five generations on his family farm, and he was the first to start the hat-throwing tradition in his family 50 years ago. He can’t remember exactly why he did it the first time, but he does remember his dad’s reaction.

“I think he was quite pleased about it. He hadn’t see that before, and I really don’t know what enthralled me to do it. I guess something came into my mind and I did it. Finality, I guess. You’re done. (By the end of the year) the hat’s kind of won out and dirty.

Now that Robert himself has retired, he doesn’t run a combine anymore, and instead just tags along for a couple rides a year. It’s now his son who is leading the harvest and tossing the hat into the combine to signify harvest’s end, and Robert seems to be having fun watching his son.

“I know my son’s struggling with it, because he likes his hat and he doesn’t know which one to pick,” he said.

Some have started new harvest traditions. Take, for example, the farm run by Russell Fulton’s family near Rockglen. Fulton and his family are immigrants to Canada. Fulton hails from Ireland, while his wife comes from Australia, and together they’ve been in Canada since 2015, farming on their own just north of Rockglen for three years with farmland spread out for miles and miles.

Together, they have three children all under the age of six, and during harvest those kids spend hours and hours riding in trucks and machinery while their parents take things out to the field. To reward their kids for their patience, every year the Fulton family has created a scavenger hunt for the kids in one of their fields.

“The kids spend a lot of hours just sitting in the car all the time moving stuff around, so we felt kind of bad for them,” Fulton said.

“We just kind of wanted to start some kind of a tradition that would be one for the kids, give them something to look forward to. I guess this will be the third year of it.”

The piece of land the Fultons finish up the year on also happens to be the first piece of land their family purchased to start their farm together. The land serves as a perfect spot for their kids to explore on the treasure hunt, with old farm machinery and bins to search through, and bushes to expand the search area into when the kids get older.

“There’s bin yard site and some machinery and stuff scattered around, so with the kids being young they’re not as good at looking, but there is a lot of bush and stuff on that spot that we’re hoping whenever they get older we’ll get more creative and more into it,” Fulton said.

“For now, we put like little coloured marker flags where there’s going to be a thing, and we just hide them in around the bin yard and around machinery here or there. What we’d like to do in the future is that they have to hitch a ride on the combine to get the spot, but for now, it’s pretty small.”

While it may not exactly be a tradition, a lot of family farms will see people take a break from their regular job to come home and help with harvest. For Andrew Urbaniak, who helps with his family farm north of Prince Albert, when he was younger harvest meant deciding between helping his family or heading to hockey camps.

“I was 14 years old and I think harvest was started already and I was trying out for the Mintos and pretty excited,” Urbaniak said.

“It was my first year dipping my toes in the AAA water, and I remember Kenny Morrison, the coach at the time, we talked back and forth once in a while and he knew that me and dad started combining. So there’s an exhibition game coming up, and I remember, I think it was a practice or something the day before the game. After it, Kenny kind of pulled me aside after and said, ‘Hey, we got a game tomorrow and we want you to play in it, but do you think it’ll be OK for you to play? Does your dad need a hand at home?’ He knew that farming started and I always kind of liked harvest, too.”

Nowadays, Urbaniuk is an industrial mechanic at the potash mine at Jansen, but his employer lets him take time off to come back to the farm and make sure his family’s crop gets off. That’s the case on a lot of family farms in Saskatchewan, and Urbaniuk said he’s proud that he still comes back and helps his family.

“It’s kind of a pride thing. I love farming and I love industry, being a mechanic as well,” he said.

Most of the fields in Saskatchewan are empty now, except for a few stragglers finishing up harvest.

As the last few farms finish up for another year, a lot of the farms in the province will also be finishing their traditions for the year, whether it’s a meal in the field, tossing a hat into the combine or simply enjoying a well-earned drink as the combines are parked for another year.