A high-tech harvest the pilgrims would envy

City dwellers may no longer make the connection, but Thanksgiving Day has long been associated with harvest time. School children do if they hear the story of Squanto teaching the pilgrims to plant corn. These days, it takes a lot more than a scrap of fish and a kernel of corn to have a successful harvest.

It’s Aug. 20, the first day of the corn harvest. Mississippi delta farmer Stephen Pillow has been waiting for this day since the seed went in the ground back in March.

“A lot of anticipation,” Pillow says. “Practicing for football. Two-a-days. Everything builds up today.”

The Pillows have 1,600 acres planted in corn on this farm. They want to get the corn cut at just the right time to maximize its price, a calculation that has to do with big questions of what’s going on in the world and little questions like, how much moisture is in the corn in this particular field?

To answer that second question, Pillow heads out to the field to the combine. The combine is a high-tech machine equipped with GPS and computers that give the farmer second-by-second information about the field as he cuts the corn.

“It’s recording the yield in real time. You can pull up a map. … Nitrogen deficiency, too much water, not enough water,” Pillow says.

They are expensive machines. Each one costs about $375,000. But they have many uses and can harvest multiple crops. The inside of the cab smells like mothballs because a rat could cause thousands of dollars in damage if it got in. Pillow turns on the motor, shuts the door, and adjusts the air conditioning.

The head, the part that cuts the corn, has 13 row spacers resembling torpedoes that align perfectly with the space between rows. Decks and chains bend the stalks, cut the ear, and send it back into the combine for busting the kernels off and separating them from chaff.

“Once it makes it to the bottom, it’s clean,” Pillow says.

The cab has two seats. The driver sits on the right side near the controls and a computer screen. On the first day of harvest, Pillow says he’s tweaking and calibrating.

“We’re trying to set the machine so we don’t have much field loss. Gaining every bushel as efficiently as possible,” he said.

In the glass-enclosed, air-conditioned cab, he is protected from the dust swirling all around. Not like the old days

“You talk about a miserable day of work,” he said. “It had to have been the worst job on the farm.”

Nearly 400 years ago, the pilgrims learned their planting techniques from Native Americans. Those who didn’t learn died of starvation. Now, farmers learn on the job and from seminars by the local extension services and seed companies. Those who don’t adopt the new methods don’t survive, as Mississippi delta farmer Gene Stancel explained : “That mentality is a killer. It is an old, old story, … such an expensive endeavor. If you don’t keep up, you don’t have that mentality, you’ve got to go.”

Listen to Susan Olasky retell her day with farmer Stephen Pillow on The World and Everything in It: