Dan: 0:00

Walk down the bread aisle at your grocery store. An unbroken chain of work made every loaf possible. From the farmer to the mill worker to the baker to the delivery truck driver. But there's someone missing in that chain. It's a job you've probably never heard of. The custom harvester.

Josh: 0:22

A lot of the things that you would find in the store and eat, why they have been harvested by me and people that also do what I do.

Dan: 0:32

Josh Beckley is a third generation custom harvester. He runs Beckley Harvesting out of Colby, Kansas. Every year, Josh and a crew travel 500 miles south from Kansas to Haskell, Texas. He travels with a caravan of equipment, combines, tractors, trucks.

Josh: 0:52

And then we'll just start harvesting other farmers' crops. And as crops ripen, they ripen from south to north because it gets warm down there faster. And we'll just harvest other people's crops from Texas to Montana.

Dan: 1:05

It's called the harvest run.

Josh: 1:08

So on my run last year, I did about, 5,000,000 bushels. Almost everything that we do in some way, somebody around the world eats somewhere.

Dan: 1:20

Up next, the invisible work that makes your bread aisle possible. I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a Christmas tree farmer, a baker, a car mechanic. We wanna know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Josh Beckley what it's like to be a custom harvester. We'll talk about what is a harvester's greatest enemy, how GPS technology shaved time off every single harvest day, and why he's sometimes a target of other people's middle fingers. Stay with us. I asked Josh why farmers would use a custom harvester like him rather than just doing the harvest themselves. And a big part of the answer was speed. A farmer might have one combine. Josh has five, plus a full crew ready to do the work, which means a job might take a few days instead of a few weeks. And the reason that speed matters? Weather.

Josh: 2:45

You know, when wheat is ripe is when we have all of our big nasty storms out here. So hail, tornadoes, heavy wind, with rain, all that stuff. And wheat is a very picky crop on being harvested quickly. Because if you're too late on harvesting wheat, you lose grade, which means poor quality, and you know, if you get a hailstorm or a heavy wind, tornado, something like that, why, it's gone in a minute.

Dan: 3:10

Wow.

Josh: 3:11

So, you know, what was a really good crop can go to nothing in a matter of five minutes. So, there's hundreds of thousands of wheat acres planted out here every year, and if it's not harvested quickly and on time, why it it can go bad and then there you see farmers don't make their living.

Dan: 3:29

So, you start in Texas and you just kinda make your way north one farm at a time.

Josh: 3:35

Yep. That's correct. So, wheat typically out here will ripen at about 50 miles a day, generally, from south to north.

Dan: 3:45

Alright. So let's start the season in May, you're in Texas, you reach the first farm. What is that first day like? Like, when you pull up, I imagine you stop in and chat with the farmer for a second. What what is that first conversation like? What do you need to learn, if anything?

Josh: 4:00

Well, most of my farmers that I cut for, I have cut for them for years, some of them decades.

Dan: 4:05

Okay.

Josh: 4:06

If I pull into a new place, like, I'm gonna wanna kinda lay out of the land, you know, take me around and show me your fields.

Dan: 4:12

Mhmm.

Josh: 4:13

Give me a kind of a rundown of obstacles that might be in the field. You know, if it's an old tree stump that fell down fifteen years ago, but dang it, we haven't gotten around to pulling it out of the ground yet.

Dan: 4:24

Mhmm.

Josh: 4:25

Well, over time, they farm closer and closer and closer, and eventually over some of the obstacles, you know. And then, we need to know where they are so we don't wreck our equipment by running into it.

Dan: 4:36

Yeah.

Josh: 4:36

So, that'll be some of the first things. The other things I wanna know is, you know, where do you want us to take your grain to? And we'll go check out, you know, the elevators or grain bin sites to see what kind of we're looking at as far as logistics on our trucks, how far they have to go, and just how you navigate and get around there.

Dan: 4:54

The harvesting process starts with the combine. And just a quick refresher for non farm kids like me, if you can picture in your head a giant machine that's harvesting crops, that's the combine. You can use the same combine to harvest corn and wheat and other crops, but you need different headers for each crop. So the header is the front part that grabs the crop and either cuts the plant as with wheat or pulls off the useful part, like ears of corn. And then it feeds that stuff into the combine. And what's amazing, to me at least, is that the combine actually does the processing and separating of the good stuff from the waste. So what you're left with is a tank full of grain or corn kernels. I asked Josh how fast the combines can go.

Josh: 5:47

While we're in the field, well, that varies greatly depending on the condition of the wheat. You know, if it's green, then we gotta go slower. If it's the stocks are dry, we can go faster. I'd say probably at an average speed through a field is about four to five miles an hour.

Dan: 6:04

So Josh's combine harvests a football field's worth of crops roughly every four and a half minutes. He used to drive his combine manually, but about twenty ish years ago, GPS driven autosteer technology came along, and he said it was a game changer.

Josh: 6:23

If you're driving that thing manually, you'll have header hanging out the edge of the wheat, so not making full use of your equipment. Right? So, if you have four feet of header hanging out on average through the day and you put in, say, sixteen hours in a day, you're harvesting a lot of acres twice, essentially.

Dan: 6:41

Oh, I see. Okay.

Josh: 6:43

Except you're going over crop that you've already harvested, so it's just wasted time and wasted trips across the field. So, by the GPS and autosteer coming in, we're able to keep a full header almost all the time in a field, which increased our efficiency. I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood of probably 15 to 20%.

Dan: 7:03

Oh, man, that's a lot. I mean, I guess it's sort of like, you know, having a lawn mower where you never went over the same ground more than once, like, could imagine that would make a big difference.

Josh: 7:13

Exactly. Yeah. And then you'd get to the end of the day, and a lot of our days are twelve to sixteen hours. You get to the end of the day if you're trying to control that manually all day long, at the end of a week, you're just much much more fatigued.

Dan: 7:27

Yeah. So, is that the length of your days, twelve to sixteen hours?

Josh: 7:32

Yeah, when we're harvesting good, that's pretty darn common. We'll we'll usually leave to go to the field, you know, about 7 o'clock, and depending on when elevators shut down or when the grain gets tough, you know, our early night is 10 o'clock. Our late nights...

Dan: 7:48

Really?

Josh: 7:48

Midnight to two or three in the morning.

Dan: 7:50

That is insane. And and so you're still harvesting at night?

Josh: 7:55

Oh, yeah. Yep. Our combines are equipped with some pretty darn good lights.

Dan: 8:00

Wow. And you don't, you know, like, take weekends off, right? That seems contrary to what you're describing here. So, it's just day after day of that?

Josh: 8:09

Yep. That's correct. As long as the grain is ripe and ready to go and the weather's good, we've got to go. So, it doesn't matter if it's, you know, fourth of July, if it's a holiday, if it's time to cut and the weather's good, you gotta be going. Because you like I was saying earlier, you've got a short window of prime harvest weather a lot of times, and you've gotta get it as much out as you can get out, if not all of it.

Dan: 8:33

And what is the harvest window for I imagine it's different for different crops, but maybe just give us wheat and corn. Like, are we talking days or weeks or months or, like, how how wide is the window?

Josh: 8:46

Well, the window width really depends on the weather. If the weather is, you know, good, you're not getting rain or anything like that, and it's the air is dry in the morning and the evening, the window is long. But if you're in a season where it's kind of rainy, it really varies quite a bit. It might only be a few days that you have to get it out at its best condition.

Dan: 9:10

Yeah.

Josh: 9:11

Corn is different. See, corn has the husk on it, right? So, when corn is ripe, the ears go from pointing up to pointing down and the husk is still attached. And the husk, really, after the corn is ripe, is just a protective layer that keeps the kernels from going bad. So wheat doesn't have any of that. Like, it's got some chaff, but it's really thin and it gets wet really easily because it's all still pointing straight up. So wheat, if it gets wet very long, it can sprout inside of the head before it's harvested or falls out of the head, it can sprout, and if wheat sprouts in the head, its quality is completely gone and about all it's good for is pig feed.

Dan: 9:54

And how frequently are you running into more severe weather, like hail or tornadoes or that sort of thing?

Josh: 10:01

There's areas that we get hailed out every year, and a lot of times, you know, it'll hail just before we get there, but it does also hail while we're there.

Dan: 10:09

And if it hails, like, are the crops done or is it more complicated than that?

Josh: 10:14

No, they're completely shot. If it hails very much, they'll take a nice standing golden wheat field and it'll hammer it down to where it looks like it's already been harvested. I've even seen some hailstorms that are so bad that you can't even tell that it was a wheat crop. It'll pound it right into the ground.

Dan: 10:32

Man, that has gotta be heartbreaking for the farmer. A whole season's worth of crops, right, just done in a couple hours.

Josh: 10:40

Well, for a lot of farmers, that's their complete livelihood, you know, because they plant that crop in September, October, and then it winters, and you know, they'll be spraying, and they'll be fertilizing, and you know, putting all their money into making the best crop that they can make, and then in twenty minutes, gone. So yes, it is it is extremely heartbreaking when that happens, because their entire year's worth of income is gone.

Dan: 11:07

And what does that do to your income? Does it affect you?

Josh: 11:10

It's also gone.

Dan: 11:12

Really?

Josh: 11:13

Yes.

Dan: 11:15

So you get paid based on production, so you're kind of taking the risk alongside them, huh?

Josh: 11:20

Yep. That's exactly what I'm doing. If they don't make anything because there's nothing there to harvest, I don't make anything either.

Dan: 11:29

So, how big is the crew that you're bringing with you on on this, you know, south to north journey?

Josh: 11:36

So, all summer long, so like April from about the first to about the September 1, I have about 16 people that travel with me.

Dan: 11:44

Okay.

Josh: 11:45

And then in fall harvest, because corn is a higher yielding crop than wheat, we have to increase our crew just to deal with the extra volume. So we'll be about 24 people from September to November.

Dan: 11:59

Okay. And and where do you stay when you're on the road?

Josh: 12:03

We have big crew trailers or campers.

Dan: 12:06

Oh, so you sort of bring your own lodging with you?

Josh: 12:08

Yep. So, we have...

Dan: 12:10

Wow.

Josh: 12:10

We have five campers that we take on the road with us. One is for myself with my wife and my boys, and then I've got other crew trailers that I put, you know, my guys in. We try not to fill them full usually, but sometimes we need to. But my campers for my crew are, I mean, they're big. They're 56 feet long with five slide outs in them, or six slide outs in some.

Dan: 12:34

But still probably not drowning in space there, pretty cramped quarters, right?

Josh: 12:38

Yeah, in comparison to a house, it's definitely cramped quarters. You know, the worst part of it, I suppose, you know, from my guys' perspective, is if you're out working a normal job, you can leave and go home at night, and that guy that made you mad during the day or you got some beef with, you get to go home and forget about him for the night.

Dan: 12:57

Yeah. You can go home and complain to your spouse about them and

Josh: 13:00

Right. On this deal, you go home with that guy and you stay with that guy. There's no going and just forgetting about him because he'll be right there to say hello and poke your buttons again.

Dan: 13:13

Josh recruits his crew primarily from overseas. Australia, Ireland, England, South Africa, South America. I asked him why he has to go overseas for people. Is there just not enough labor here, or do people from overseas work cheaper, or what?

Josh: 13:30

Yeah, it's definitely not cheaper. Okay. I would be very happy if I could hire 100% Americans and depend on them to stay all year, and that's right in there is probably my biggest issue that I have with Americans. I still hire Americans every year, but my turnover rate on Americans versus my foreign guys is exponential.

Dan: 13:54

Really?

Josh: 13:55

Through COVID, right? Like, all through those years, I had people that would, I mean, sometimes they just come out and see everything that's happening and it was just overwhelming, they couldn't take it. I had to turn around and go home the same day. And they may have drove ten hours to get there.

Dan: 14:10

So they would just flake, basically.

Josh: 14:12

Yep. And then we'd have other guys that would try it, but a lot of the kids nowadays live too much on their phone, and they'd see what their buddies were doing at the lake every weekend. And their girlfriends and their moms would call them and just miss them.

Dan: 14:29

Yeah.

Josh: 14:30

Because they, you know, once you're out here, you're out here. Like, they can come visit you for a little bit, but they can't stay with you.

Dan: 14:36

Yeah.

Josh: 14:36

And when it's time to go to work, we gotta work. Then you can't plan two days to go see somebody.

Dan: 14:42

Gosh, that's so interesting. So it's almost better that someone had to fly twelve hours to come over because then it's almost like they're burning the bridge behind them. It's not as easy for them to just have second thoughts and drive off or something.

Josh: 14:56

Right. That's part of it. And for whatever reason, their commitment level is higher than a lot of the kids that we currently have here.

Dan: 15:07

Right. Right.

Josh: 15:08

They don't quit, I guess. When they're here, I told you I would be here, so I'm gonna be here even if I don't like it until the end, until you tell me I'm done.

Dan: 15:18

So Josh and his international crew hit the road driving south to north with basically an armada of farm equipment.

Josh: 15:26

So we'll have with us on the road all the time. We'll have five combines.

Dan: 15:31

Five combines. Wow. And those cost what a piece roughly?

Josh: 15:35

Combines are anywhere from about 700 to 850, $900,000 each.

Dan: 15:43

Wow.

Josh: 15:43

And then you have to put a header on it, and that header is, you know, generally a 150 to $ 250,000, depending on what you want.

Dan: 15:51

Okay. So, we're already at $5,000,000 worth of capital equipment so far.

Josh: 15:55

Easy. Yeah.

Dan: 15:56

That's wild. So, five combines?

Josh: 15:58

Yeah. Then you have to have the headers on them. Through the summer, we take three tractors most places with us. Each tractor is about $550,000. The grain cart that it pulls is a $120,000.

Dan: 16:12

Okay.

Josh: 16:12

And then through the summer, you only need about one truck per combine. We generally take a little extra in case we got some longer hauls and just so they don't have to run as hard. So, we usually run six or seven trucks in the summer, and they all have a grain trailer.

Dan: 16:27

And the trucks, these are like semi trucks?

Josh: 16:30

Yes.

Dan: 16:30

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Josh: 16:32

Semi trucks, not a pickup truck. So, they're 18 wheelers. They range in cost all over the board. I think my oldest cheapest one's like $10,000, and my newest one's about 70 or 80. And then each grain trailer's about $40,000 each.

Dan: 16:46

So, you've got at least spitting distance of $10,000,000 worth of equipment rolling down the road from Texas to North Dakota, it sounds like.

Josh: 16:54

In the ballpark, yeah. In control of 18 to 25 year olds, yes. No stress, no stress.

Dan: 17:03

Yeah. Everything's fine. I'm just trying to picture, like, you literally have a caravan on the road of all this stuff. Right? I mean, I can't there's there's no other way to get it from place to place.

Josh: 17:12

Yeah. That's right. When we move, it's a long line of stuff.

Dan: 17:16

I would hate to get stuck behind you and your crew. Ugh.

Josh: 17:19

Exactly. I have seen the middle finger a time or two. So so we try to split up how we move things. Now, we we keep our guys together, We try to leave enough room in between all of our stuff for cars and trucks and everything to get in so they don't try to pass us all at once.

Dan: 17:37

We're gonna take a quick break, and right after, what can go horribly wrong on the harvest run? Stay with us. So one of the classic roles of a podcast host is to pester the audience to leave reviews. And I have left you tragically unpestered for a long time, so let's resolve that. Here are three good reasons to post a review. One, it really does help new listeners find the show, which grows our noble tribe. Two, it helps us get great guests because it shows that we have an enthusiastic audience and great guests are good for you too. Three, it makes Matt and me feel good. We like warm fuzzies. So anyway, help us out, post a review, and now let's get back to the harvest run. What would you say you've been doing this for a lot of years. What was the biggest disaster that you've ever run into in your work?

Josh: 18:39

Well, I'll tell you about two. One, we had a fire in the field once, a bearing had went out on a header, and it caught afire in a cornfield, and it was a windy day, and fire makes its own wind. And man, gosh, it burned I think it burned about 300 acres, but luckily we didn't lose any equipment in it. But, I mean, we did lose the field to fire, and then, you know, it burned through pasture, so that neighbor had his pasture gone for the winter.

Dan: 19:06

And so, who's liable in that situation? Like, did the farmers come after you?

Josh: 19:11

We have we we have insurance to cover that stuff.

Dan: 19:14

Mhmm.

Josh: 19:14

Yeah. Generally, if we cause any kind of an accident like that, then yeah, that's what we've got insurance for.

Dan: 19:19

Okay.

Josh: 19:20

And pay quite a bit for, so but the other thing that we had, we had a combine just kinda fall off in a ditch.

Dan: 19:28

Oh.

Josh: 19:28

My guy that was driving it, we had two combines go by this steep spot ahead of him. I was in the lead one actually, and I told him, was like, alright, you drive right here in my tracks, do not get out of my tracks.

Dan: 19:39

But of course, dear listener, the other driver did get out of Josh's tracks and found himself on slick grass.

Josh: 19:47

And he slipped off of the road and the combine fell into a six foot box culvert. The back wheels, they weren't on the ground. The back of the combine was wedged on one side of a, like, a ravine or a wash, and the front tires were on the other side, and I was just certain if we would move that thing wrong, it was just gonna roll over and fall in further.

Dan: 20:08

What in the world do you do?

Josh: 20:11

Well, I had no idea what to do. So, I had another harvester that was a friend of mine, was in the same area that we were, an older guy than well, older than me anyway, and I called him up just frantic, and I said, would you please come over here and try to help me figure out what needs to happen? And he did, and he kinda pointed me in the right direction, and we had to get two crane trucks, like the big trucks that pull semis over, you know, loaded semis, they'll they'll lift those out of a ditch. So we had to get two of those out there, one to lift and kinda pull on the front and the other one to lift the back end up, and they worked it together. And they lift this thing up out of the hole, kind of lift slash drug it back onto the road so we could start getting it so it was mobile again and then

Dan: 21:00

Wow.

Josh: 21:00

Haul it off to get fixed, because, boy, that had a lot of things that needed fixed on it.

Dan: 21:04

Oh, man. And so what happened to the driver?

Josh: 21:08

Well, after he got his pants cleaned out, he took an extra day to get his his brain and emotions back in check.

Dan: 21:16

Oh, man.

Josh: 21:16

And then, you know, he come back to work, but...

Dan: 21:18

Oh, you didn't fire him.

Josh: 21:20

No. No. I I did not fire him. We... everybody makes mistakes as dumb as they are. I mean, I've made some pretty darn monumentally stupid mistakes in in my career, and if I can't afford the same forgiveness and patience with my guys that I do myself, then that doesn't make me very good at being a leader.

Dan: 21:40

So, naturally, I had to ask Josh about those mistakes that he'd made.

Josh: 21:44

This is before, you know, Google Maps, right? The farmer took me around, this is the first time I'd ever cut for this guy. He took me around and showed me about 20 fields across 35 miles, and I'm at the time, I had to just remember where everything is and how to get there. So, you know, you take notes as best as you can, and we were cutting, and I think that night it was about midnight to 1 o'clock in the morning, we'd finished the field and they're calling for rain, so we were trying to get as much done as we could, and the elevator was staying open long for us.

Dan: 22:17

So Josh rolled into the next field and started cutting, got through maybe half of it before breaking for the day. And the next morning

Josh: 22:24

I was talking to the farmer and told him, man, you got a got a lot of weeds in that field, I don't remember that. And he goes, what are you talking about? I don't have a bunch of weeds in my field. So we drove out there and sure enough, I had not cut any of his field. We drove to the other end of the section and I was on the neighbor's field, we were whacking away at.

Dan: 22:45

So you did some pro bono work for the neighbor.

Josh: 22:47

We did some pro bono work for the neighbor. His biggest complaint was that I didn't finish and he had to.

Dan: 22:54

Beckley harvesting is a family business, literally. Josh's family joins him on the road.

Josh: 23:00

My first son was actually born in Bismarck, North Dakota on harvest.

Dan: 23:05

You're kidding.

Josh: 23:05

No. No. So, I mean, terrible for my wife. We thought we were gonna be in South Dakota, and then things just happened sooner and, nope, you're in North Dakota. Time to find a new doctor, like, now because you're in labor.

Dan: 23:19

Oh my goodness.

Josh: 23:21

So we went to the hospital and whoever came in, came in. I don't even remember who the guy was. But my boys have been involved in in harvest since they were, you know, I think five years old when they started moving pickups from field to field.

Dan: 23:35

No kidding.

Josh: 23:36

Oh, yeah. By the time they were seven, eight years old, they were driving tractors and combines. And then about the time they hit 11 to 12 years old, that's full-time. You're a crew member now.

Dan: 23:49

Wow. Man, I bet they've learned so much over the years.

Josh: 23:53

Oh, they they've learned a ton. There's not many people that my boys can't work under the table. And they've been able to watch me and learn how to lead people. So, what I learned from my dad, I picked up and carried on. So, they've got three generations ahead of them of knowledge that they're watching play out every day and that they're learning from. So, my 16 year old and my 20 year old, I don't know what they've got about them, they've but they've got something that people follow them. And gosh, my 16 year old, a story from when he was about seven years old, they were in school and my wife brought supper to the field for everybody. And he he rolled up and he went and hopped on one of the trucks and looked in there, grain cart had just filled it. And he calls this 20 year old guy over there, this six year old kid, calls this 20 year old over and says, hey, crawl up here and I want you to look in this trailer. He crawls up he crawled up there. He listened to him, number one. Like, why would you listen to a six year old tell you to come over here and look at this? And he did. And he says, hey, you're not loading this right, you gotta load here to here and then jump a spot and load there to there. And you know that guy, he did it. He did it. After that, he started loading the trailers more right.

Dan: 25:10

Man, that kid was on the management track early. That's impressive.

Josh: 25:13

He is. And and the guys have listened to both of those two the whole time.

Dan: 25:20

So Josh, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know, and what does it mean?

Josh: 25:32

Wheaty. Weedy. No. Not weedy. Wheaty. Like, "w", "h", "e""a", "t", "y".

Dan: 25:39

Yeah. Okay. Got it.

Josh: 25:40

A lot of places we go, people call us Wheaties, and that means that the custom harvesters have rolled into town.

Dan: 25:46

So that's your nickname, the Wheaties.

Josh: 25:48

Yep. Especially in the Southern part of the states. Oklahoma and Texas, we're Wheaties.

Dan: 25:55

What is the most insulting thing you could say about a custom harvester's work?

Josh: 26:00

Gosh, not to sound bad, but that you're a farmer.

Dan: 26:04

What does that mean?

Josh: 26:05

Well, we're not farmers. We do things at a completely different pace than a farmer.

Dan: 26:11

Oh, I see. So, that would be like calling you working at a snail's pace or something.

Josh: 26:15

Kind of. Farmers just work at a different pace than what we work at.

Dan: 26:20

Yeah.

Josh: 26:20

So

Dan: 26:20

Yeah. Yeah.

Josh: 26:21

It's not necessarily an insult, but it's something that I correct people when they tell me that, I guess. We'll go with that. It's not an insult, but it's, "No, we're not the same."

Dan: 26:31

What is a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Josh: 26:36

Oh, our combines. I love driving combine.

Dan: 26:39

Why?

Josh: 26:40

You know, I I like watching fields of crop disappear from standing to cut. It's like when I clean things, don't wanna clean something that's a little dirty, I wanna clean something that's filthy. Take your take your pickup out on a muddy road, then let's clean it, so we can tell what we've done.

Dan: 26:56

You know, there I mean, obviously, I've I've never spent one second on a combine, but even just watching the videos, there's there's something just magical about what that machine does. I mean, it's almost like science fiction.

Josh: 27:10

It is. It is very cool to pull into, especially corn, love picking irrigated corn. Just lots of bushels, tall crop, and when you're done with it, it's about a foot tall, it goes from 10 feet to one foot in an instant, and the grain is in thrashed in ten seconds. I mean, that is that is just cool.

Dan: 27:30

It is cool. And and just watching you in the cab, it looked like your attention was on there was, like, some kind of monitor with a bunch of different, metrics or something on there. Like, what what is that and what are you monitoring?

Josh: 27:44

So in our combines, we have two monitors. One of them is just a GPS monitor.

Dan: 27:49

Mhmm.

Josh: 27:49

The other one is combine settings

Dan: 27:51

Okay.

Josh: 27:52

And yield monitoring. So you watch what the yield of the crop is, the moisture of the crop is, and you're constantly adjusting your combine to do the best job that it can do all the time.

Dan: 28:02

It kinda gets at what I was curious about, which is, does this require your full attention or or can you kinda zone out and listen to tunes or something? And it sounds like it's definitely the first.

Josh: 28:11

Yeah. Somebody that's good at it and a good operator is constantly paying attention to what the combine is doing, how it's working all the time.

Dan: 28:20

What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a custom harvester?

Josh: 28:26

Probably the biggest fear is when one of my guys calls me on the radio and says, hey, we've got a big problem, can you come look at it? And I'm 20 miles away.

Dan: 28:37

Oh.

Josh: 28:37

Because they never give you any description of what happened.

Dan: 28:41

So you've got 20 miles to wonder what you're about to walk into.

Josh: 28:45

Yeah. I mean, a prime example of that is a couple years ago, one of my guys wrecked a truck. He wasn't the one that called me, it was somebody that saw it in the rearview mirror. And he called me on the phone, and most of the time we've got bad reception, so you get bits and pieces, or I got bits and pieces."I saw it in my mirror, he rolled the truck lots of times, there's no way he's alive," and I lost him.

Dan: 29:08

Oh.

Josh: 29:09

So, I'm driving for twenty minutes to get to this kid, and I get there, he didn't roll it multiple times, he laid it on its side. And I walked around the other side of the truck and he was standing there, he didn't have a scratch on him. I was like, man, I was scared to death for this kid and what it means for all of that to I mean, I was going over conversations that I'm gonna have to call his dad back in South Africa.

Dan: 29:36

Oh, man.

Josh: 29:36

And having a conversation with somebody that telling them that somebody has died, that is awful. That is... For the people and, you know, our first responders and military that have to do that, gosh, my heart goes out to them because, wow, that is an awful job.

Dan: 29:52

What's something about the job that it took you years to really properly understand?

Josh: 30:00

How to manage people.

Dan: 30:01

Mmm. I don't think you're alone there.

Josh: 30:04

That is something that is constantly learned. Generations change, look at gen z, gen x. You you have to learn to adapt in the words that you use to talk to them with, the tone that you use to talk to people with. If you're standing there looking at them, you gotta learn how to control facial expressions a lot of times. I mean, that's something that you can't afford to stop learning.

Dan: 30:28

So what what would you say is the biggest difference in the way you manage now versus twenty years ago, let's say?

Josh: 30:35

It would probably be just the patience that I have in dealing with adversity and situations. You know, when somebody comes up to me and tells me that they messed up, I'm generally pretty calm about that now, because I realize that, you know, it is a piece of iron, and I can replace iron. It's hard to replace a person, whether you fire them, whether they quit.

Dan: 30:58

Mhmm.

Josh: 30:59

The biggest change that I've tried to make and am making as I age is being able to try to comprehend how every word affects somebody else's life.

Dan: 31:13

That care Josh puts into how he speaks to people, it's not just personal philosophy. In the custom harvester world, it's how business works.

Josh: 31:24

We don't have written contracts with any of my farmers. And most of the guys that harvest, I don't know of hardly anybody that does a written contract. Most of us are a handshake, and out here, your word is your bond. If you don't got your word, then you don't got much, and you know, that that news travels fast. And if you're not honest, you know, you don't get called to come help a guy with his job, and you don't get referred to to get a new job. And farmers are the same way. Some of those guys got bad reputations that nobody will go cut for. But, yeah, things that I've learned from my father and my grandfather is you best have really good character to lead on with our family name.

Dan: 32:20

Josh Beckley is a custom harvester. He runs Beckley Harvesting, a third generation family owned and operated company. After this interview, my mind kept circling the ideas of risk and trust. Farmers turned to custom harvesters in part because of the risk of bad weather, a hailstorm that destroys a year's work in twenty minutes. Now crop insurance helps, but it doesn't make the farmers whole, so they still have a desire to harvest faster. And the custom harvesters they turn to, like Josh, they share in that risk. If the crops don't get harvested, then Josh doesn't get paid. You and I pay people to absorb risk too. We pay homeowners insurance and health insurance, but notice it doesn't really feel like shared risk. Homeowners insurance is full of stipulations that pass risk back over the fence to you. Health insurers get richer when they find ways not to pay. It's not shared risk, it's risk hot potato. But it doesn't have to be like that. I remember learning about a health system in Alaska called Southcentral Foundation, where the system is both the insurer and the health care provider. They call that an integrated system, kind of similar to Kaiser Permanente. And just as bad weather is the shared enemy for Josh and the farmers, the shared enemy for Southcentral and you, the patient, is chronic disease because it's horrible for you and it's horrible for the people who have to pay for all that care for years and years. So with those flipped incentives, Southcentral goes out of its way to prevent chronic disease and that means meeting you where you are. If you need help, you can literally just text someone and they'll respond. If you need an appointment, they'll line it up that day because they're in it with you. Now that arrangement sounds like a fantasy for most of us because there are structural and economic pillars underlying Southcentral that are really difficult to put in place in The US, which is striking. All that infrastructure needed to replicate what, in Josh's case, is so simple. The fruits of three generations of work and a handshake. Chasing the harvest north as crops ripen mile by mile, turning standing crops into finished product in a single pass, fighting fatigue over sixteen hour days, and feeding a global chain where your work becomes someone's daily bread. Folks, that's what it's like to be a custom harvester. A special thank you to Grace Kraft who suggested Josh for the show. And if you know someone who you think would be great, encourage them to call our voicemail number. You can always find that number in the show notes. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.