Combine Drivers on Harvest Cutting Edge : Agriculture: Some 3,000 hired outfits work from south Texas to the Canadian border, with swings west to California.

They are the cowboys of agriculture, the traveling salesmen of the harvest. And on this sunny afternoon their big cutting machines are thrashing like Mississippi paddle-wheelers across a rolling ocean of Montana wheat and barley.

That is where we find Doug Neufeld squatting in the dusty wake of his machines, studying the leavings of stubble and chaff like a hunter reading the spoor of his prey. If there’s too much wasted seed in the mix he’ll be on the radio, calling out adjustments. But keep those combiners rolling, because an ugly slate-bottomed cloud is boiling up in the northeast.

Neufeld is a custom combiner, and the crews that he and his brothers run are among perhaps 3,000 outfits cutting their way across America’s midsection, from south Texas to the Canadian border, with occasional swings west to California. Every May they resume a nomadic ritual of trailer-home caravans, hot dinners served in the field and children who track down old, familiar playmates from summer to summer, town to town, as their families move north with the harvest on toward fall.

These itinerant cutters reap more than half of all the nation’s wheat , first tackling the winter wheat of the Southern Plains and then moving to the spring crop as it ripens in the north. That has been the general tendency since the 1920s, and with top-flight combines now running to $120,000 apiece many farmers are less inclined than ever to take on the job themselves.

So, as grain ripens and dries in sunny fields across the wheat belt, farmers dial up the mobile phones of people like the Neufeld brothers--Keith, Bruce and Doug, of Inman, Kan.--then pace the floor, fret about hailstorms and watch the horizon for the distant plumes of farm-road dust that signal the approach of the machines.

The cutters are no less edgy. For all their technology and the comforting regularity of the seasons, they often move in fits and starts. As the ripening edge of the wheat crop sweeps north it can leap forward by a whole state at a time when a heat wave settles over the plains, drying the grain to just the right level of moisture. But when the rains come and the grain gets as soggy as a day-old bowl of cereal, everything stops.

So it is that when Neufeld and his crew come rumbling down the gravel road at noon here, about 40 miles southeast of Billings, farmer Ed Nessen is waiting in his four-by-four truck. He is eager to show them 2,100 acres of wheat and barley ready for cutting.

The eagerness is mutual. Nessen is a first-time customer, one the Neufelds have sought for years. The acreage means a steady week of cutting if the weather holds, and at the going rate it will bring the Neufelds up to $32,000.

The brothers grew into the business, taking the wheel of the combines as kids, then working their way up to full duties by their early teens. Their own sons have completed the cycle. Keith’s 15-year-old son Kevin is as steady a hand as any, and Doug’s son A.J., at age 13, can be found steering a combine through the field on most afternoons.

With old friends scattered along their route, the harvest journey can seem like a rolling reunion tour. Driving down an interstate highway leading out of Billings, Doug Neufeld recalls that his father would park the family trailer on a farm lot next to a canal, where he’d swim with his pals, the farmer’s kids.

“I used to look forward to seeing all of my friends in the different locations,” he said. And by being the harbingers of the harvest, he said, “In most cases people are very happy to see you. They’re anxious to see you. It is the highlight of their year.”

With familiarity so much a part of their job, meeting a new customer such as Nessen can put Neufeld “on pins and needles,” he said, and in initial encounters between combiner and farmer a courtship of sorts takes place.

On this afternoon in Nessen’s field, he and Neufeld speak to each other from the open windows of their trucks in the politest of tones, each deferring to the other as they discuss where the cutting should begin.

The first field is to be a vast expanse of barley. Later will come 1,600 acres of wheat.

For this day the main worry is the threat of rain, as clouds come and go threateningly for the first several hours. The Neufelds began this year’s harvest bogged in the rains of south Texas for several weeks, idled inside their trailers while costs mounted and income stayed at zero.

From there the weather got better as Doug took a crew up into northern Texas, then on into Kansas and Colorado, before reaching Billings on July 24. Keith Neufeld, meanwhile, took a crew west to California for a few weeks, then moved back to the Texas Panhandle and other points in Colorado before linking up with Doug’s machines in Billings.

With the end of the wheat harvest, they were to head back to Kansas and the Texas Panhandle, to harvest corn and soybeans.

All in all, they say, it’s not a bad way to see a big chunk of the country.

“We see it in a different way than tourists do,” Doug said. “We get back up off the main roads and see a lot of the country that nobody else sees.”

By 6:30 p.m., Doug’s wife Pam has arrived with A.J., who is not cutting today, and his younger sisters Tonya, 11, and Jill, 6. They have brought a hot meal of beef patties, bread, green beans, a congealed salad and a large cooler of iced tea on an 80-minute trip to the field.

Dinner is served on the grass, while the combine engines idle, and then it’s back to cutting.

If the operator of the local grain elevator weren’t closing down so early, cutting would have gone on until the dew fell, which on especially dry days might not happen until midnight.

Harvesting has brought a good living to Doug Neufeld and his brothers, and they have been able to build up a large 10-combine operation that, when traveling in full caravan, can stretch down the interstate highway 21 vehicles long.

But when he contemplates career prospects for his 13-year-old son, the harvest doesn’t often win out.

“He’s at the age right now where he still thinks it’s pretty neat, but I would like for him to explore other areas.”

Neufeld then pauses, driving down the interstate near Billings while wheat fields and sunflowers roll by on either side.