Bismarck Tribune

By LAUREN DONOVBy LAUREN DONOVAN

REGENT - Ripe grain waits for no man. In Regent, they bring in a small army with tactical equipment and wage a ground war.

It doesn't take that army very long to capture the grain, unless the enemy shows up, which it has this week.

There's not a thing anyone can do to stop the rain. The sweet fragrant showers would be so welcome if the grain weren't ripe and ready.

So the army sits idle down in Regent, where time is money that no one wants to spend.

This army is made up of men, women and families that pull in with millions of dollars worth of John Deere green or International Harvester red combines.

They talk a little Southern, because back home is Kansas, or Oklahoma.

Regent waits every year for them and mows down vacant lots to make room for their housing trailers, trucks and various pieces of equipment.

There are some 60 combines, 10 crews and about 200 extra people associated with this harvest army, and an increasing number of producers couldn't do without 'em.

Neither could places like the Regent Garage and the Regent Co-op Grocery, where August's income makes up for all the slow months in the dead of winter.

At the Regent Garage, Gary Wiseman said he does one-third of his annual sales in August alone.

He orders in a 10,000-gallon diesel tanker every day, but rainout days screw up the plan. There's no place to store the fuel when it isn't being loaded out for the fields.

"We love to see them coming," Wiseman said. "They're good for the community and they're good people. We'd be struggling if they weren't here."

On a rainy day, or the day after a night of rain, the army of harvesters takes care of repairs, catches up on sleep, or hooks up to the Internet to write home, which for some is halfway around the world from Kansas.

Curt Honeyman of rural Regent has been hiring custom cutters for 15 years.

He's got a 1991 model combine for sale himself. He says it makes more sense to pay to get that crop off fast than to take a financial hit if, say, the durum loses its perfect edge in a wet, cool spell.

Honeyman said Regent is a huge area for custom cutters, because nature's so cooperative, giving up good crops on a regular basis.

Clyde - call him "Spud," everyone does - Walker's been coming up from Oklahoma to cut wheat since 1960.

In bibs and cap, he was filling coolers with ice and making a cell phone call from the back of his van, waiting for the wheat to dry Wednesday.

He didn't know Honeyman's reasoning, but concurred anyway.

Walker said Regent is one of those places in the country, like Big Springs, Neb., or Wantonga, Okla., that just gets good crops.

Things are good in Regent, but different.

Walker said in the old days, fields were half black summer fallow and half gold wheat, and there were four farmsteads with people on them to every one out there now.

He looks down Main Street, which is buzzing pretty good for a middle of the week, small town day.

"You see all these kids around here and they're all going to college. They'll probably never come back," Walker said.

He's parked just across from the Enchanted Highway gift shop. The big tour bus and five or six tourist cars that pull in after touring the whimsical sculptures on the highway don't go unnoticed.

For that, Regent's got a leg up, while a lot of Midwestern towns stand dying flat-footed, Walker said.

In another sign that times have changed, all right, Walker paid $5,200 for two combine tires the other day, same as he paid for the first combine he ever bought.

The behemoth combines that get pulled into Regent cost about $250,000 and that's without the header attachments at another $25,000 a pop.

That's one reason Robert Candrian of rural Regent decided to use custom cutters when he started farming eight years ago.

Timing is everything, and what would take him weeks - if he could find the hired help - takes the custom crew a matter of days.

It's not cheap, though.

Cutters get between $20 and $26 an acre, which adds up quick if you do math times several thousand acres.

Rates went up this year.

Cutters have to pay for diesel that's up over $2 a gallon, and that's not counting insurance, machinery and labor costs.

Candrian said he does most of farm work himself, factoring in the hired harvest crew as his main labor expense.

It's a lot of money going out, but to custom cutter Larry Schroeder of Inman, Kan., it's not all it adds up to.

Schroeder said he has to get $24 an acre to make it pay, up from the $18 to $19 an acre it took last year.

Even at that, he doesn't make much more than he would at Wal-Mart if he paid himself by the hour.

"I could stock shelves and not have the risk," he said. "The success is in being efficient."

His wife, Nancy Schroeder, grew up in the custom cutting business and said she still likes it for her three kids.

Those kids are polite and attentive, while their folks talk out on the front metal steps of their trailer parked in a lot across from the grocery store.

She said the life teaches them how to work as a family, instills a work ethic and lets the kids see a lot of the country in the summer months away from home. They might miss baseball, but they've got regular school in Inman.

Lance Schroeder said he likes to see the country, as they move from state to state, town to town, cutting ripe wheat, canola and other crops. It's hillier in North Dakota than Kansas, he observes.

Nancy Schroeder said they've made good friends across the heartland over the years, some better than back home.

Larry Schroeder worries that rising prices will take a toll on custom cutting and agriculture in general.

"This is closing in," he said. "It won't shut down, but it'll go a different direction."

It isn't a life for everybody, that's for sure.

Over at Regent City Hall, where the town set up a small computer lab, a couple of cutter crew members whiled away a rain-out day by e-mailing folks back home in the Netherlands.

Arie Vogelaar and Ian Groenenboom say their year of adventure, using a visa to work the harvest in the Great Plains, was more than enough.

"I'm not going to do this again," said Groenenboom. He said the company of the crew is too much the same day after day and he misses his home.

With rain forecast, crews were working under starlight earlier in the week, cutting well past midnight to near dawn and dew.

Out on the Enchanted Highway, another custom cutter, Martin Schroeder (no relation to the Larry Schroeder family), hails from Germany.

Martin Schroeder was repairing the tailings elevator inside the combine and wearing the same happy smile he wears all the time, said his co-worker Mike Gatton.

"That's because I love it," Martin Schroeder said. He ducks to get to the elevator piece, which doesn't quite clear his 6'7".

The combine is one of 14 owned by Snell Harvesting of Ellinwood, Kan. The custom cutting business has been around since 1955 and is now in the second generation.

The owner, Tom Snell, was headed to Bismarck on a parts run, one reason why a rain day can come in handy every couple weeks, Gatton said.

Martin Schroeder said the experience will make him valuable, perhaps, for John Deere of Germany, when it's time to settle into a real job.

It is a little unreal out where Schroeder and Gatton are working.

The field they're working for Honeyman is right next to the latest of the Enchanted Highway sculptures devised by Regent artist Gary Greff.

This one is called "Fisherman's Dream." The super-sized metal bass, trout, walleye that will eventually look like they're swimming underwater make a surreal background for the green John Deere combine pulled up for repair.

A tourist stops to ask Gatton and Schroeder if they happen to know whether the horse sculpture is up the highway or down from where they're standing.

Happens they do, and they point the old gent on his way.

Gatton turns and grins.

The Enchanted Highway works out pretty good as a place to orient the Snell Harvesting battalion of the harvest army.

"The nice thing about this road is you can tell 'em to turn off at the pheasants or the fish," he said. "Where else in the world could you do that?"

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)