Aussies Hit the Plains for ‘Working Vacation’

Back in Australia, this lumbering machine would be called a header, but Travis Bell now uses the American name: He’s seeing the world from atop a combine.

“You want it pretty comfortable in here when you are spending 12 hours a day virtually living out here,” the 22-year-old Australian says as the air-conditioned hulk rips through a thick stand of winter wheat on this remote Kansas prairie.

Inside its glass-enclosed cab, the roomy combine offers a commanding view of some of this nation’s most productive farmland.

The unceasing clatter of the machine’s rotating blades drones on hour after hour. A rabbit scampers down a row before safely ducking out of the way. Three combines, in a seemingly effortless choreographed dance, comb through the field.

A Dearth of Workers

The crackling radio leaves no doubt about who is in charge: custom cutter Shorty Kulhanek barks out instructions from another combine. The orders underscore a difference between working for an American and an Australian boss.

“Australians are so much more laid-back,” Bell says, chuckling.

Bell hopes to someday take over his father’s farm in the Australian town of Corrigin. But for now he’s content to parlay his skill as a harvester into travel and work on farms in the United States and England.

“You have to see all these things when you are younger and not hitched up with someone,” he explains.

And he’s not alone. Clad in Australian work shorts and Rossi boots, foreign workers are becoming less of an oddity during harvest in rural hamlets throughout the Midwest.

A shortage of American farm workers has prompted more U.S. custom cutters to hire their crews from places like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, says Kulhanek, who runs his custom harvest operation out of Megargel, Texas.

Companies have set up shop in those countries to recruit workers for the American harvest. Most prized are those reared on farms-- already well experienced with running the expensive modern combines and big grain trucks.

Unlike many migrant farm workers, these young workers cross the ocean mostly for adventure-- spending along the way most of the $1,500 in monthly wages.

They come in late spring for the American winter wheat harvest and follow it across the Midwest. Most also sign on for fall harvest of corn and other crops.

When the last crops are harvested in the United States, most go back home--to work the wheat harvest in December in Australia, warm season in the southern hemisphere.

A well-worn Australian flag flies from the silver travel trailer where Bell and his co-workers have set up their camp near one of the four grain elevators in Sublette, a rural western Kansas town of 1,250 people.

Bell is among five Australians working on Kulhanek’s six-man harvest crew chasing the harvest through Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska and Montana. Next door in a trailer park, another Australian crew has also camped.

“It makes you feel at home to have Aussies all around you,” he says.

Just days earlier, Kulhanek hired a new Australian worker to help out.

Bell arrives at his trailer and stares at the new hire stretched out on a bunk. It is Tim Higgins, 23, from Karlgarin in Australia. Like Bell, he comes from a farming family and plans to return home to work the wheat harvest in Australia come December.

The two farm boys went to school together--and were once “pretty good mates,” as Bell puts it. Neither knew the other had been planning to come to America to work.

“It is such a small world,” Bell says.

*

Noon. The only time in the day when the combines are turned off and the crew takes a break. Absent rain, a typical day in the field begins at 7 a.m. and ends at midnight or later.

An evening meal of sandwiches will be devoured on the go in the combines, so the harvesters relish the noon break and the hot meal it brings.

Kulhanek’s wife, Dona, has cooked up a big lunch of baked chicken, mashed potatoes, string beans and fresh fruit. A jug of lemonade sits at the picnic table where the Australians are eating. Australians don’t like iced tea, she explains.

Learning to cook for Australian tastes has been interesting. They dislike dill pickles but like lots of salt on their food, she says. And then there is their fondness for Vegemite, a popular sandwich spread back home.

The Australians keep a huge jar of it in their trailer. Kulhanek tells them to leave it in there: “We don’t need it at the table smelling things up.”

Aaron Tuddenham, a 29-year-old worker from Ballarat in Australia, is the most experienced among the crew--he has been coming back to work the harvest with Kulhanek for four years now. This is the first American harvest for his Australian co-workers.

Tuddenham just smiles--and says nothing--when his cohorts tease him that it is a pretty Nebraska schoolteacher who keeps him coming back to America.

He’s been here so long that it’s hard to tell he is Australian.

Instead of shorts he wears jeans, like the American farmhands. He wears a shirt from U.S. Custom Harvesters emblazoned with its slogan: “We harvest the grain that feeds the world.”

In Australia he earns a living fighting forest fires. When in the United States working the harvest, he sends a little of his pay back to his bank account in Australia.

“Other than that, I try to spend it all here--or waste it,” he says. “We are here on a working vacation.”

Long Hours in the Field

The Kulhaneks work the same long hours as their workers.

Shorty Kulhanek runs one of the combines but is constantly on the radio talking to his crew on other combines and grain trucks as he works the field. He gets off the radio just long enough to make a call on his cellular phone to a Montana farmer to check on the condition of crops there.

Dona Kulhanek expertly glides the tractor and grain cart beside one of the combines, running in tandem with it as an auger swings out to unload the kernels into its cart.

When the cart is full, she takes it to the truck sitting near the field where David Webb, a 35-year-old truck driver from Dubbo, Australia, waits to unload it before driving it down to the grain elevator for storage.

“I’ve come for the experience-- to have a look around and meet the people,” he says, waiting for the next load of wheat.

The Australians bring a new perspective to rural western Kansas: Towns here are bigger than back home, and there are more of them. Here you can’t drive 50 miles without going through a town; in Australia you can drive a whole day without seeing anyone. And, of course, here you drive on the “wrong side” of the road.

Dona Kulhanek packs the last sandwiches as she listens to her husband’s voice on the radio repeating instructions to one of the workers. She needs to get back to the tractor and grain cart. It’s the first day they have run three combines simultaneously, and the crew is not used to the pace.

“I can tell he is fit to be tied trying to tell this boy where he has to be and what he has to be doing,” she says.

A nurse by training, Dona thought nursing was stressful until she started working the harvest after marrying Shorty six years ago. He’s had one heart attack and quadruple bypass surgery.

Members of the crew, she says, usually go to her rather than Shorty when they have a problem: “A lot of times he doesn’t know it, but I am the mediator.”

*

The townsfolk are curious.

Local farmers want to know about rainfall amounts and the equipment they use in Australia. The girls want to know about the food the Aussies eat. And everybody asks whether they know the crocodile guy from the cable television program.

“We are here to do a job, and they are here to do a job,” Webb says. “It is a good way of meeting real people.”

While working the Texas harvest, the Australians went into Wichita Falls almost every weekend to get a few beers and meet what they call “genuine Americans.”

Drinking, they say, is an accepted part of their culture at home.

But their days at the bars have been fewer since the crew pulled into Kansas, where many counties are dry and liquor is harder to come by.

The crew is eager to move on to the harvest up north. They hear Nebraska and Montana are a bit more like home in their attitudes toward drinking.

“We work hard, party harder,” Higgins says.