This is Jenna Zeorian’s 20th summer on the road. That’s a lot of traveling for someone who is only 22. But she wouldn’t trade her life-long experiences learned during her family’s custom harvest journeys across the Great Plains for anything.
Jenna, a senior at University of Nebraska at Omaha, is one of three correspondent/bloggers on the All Aboard Wheat Harvest tour. Another correspondent is Jada Bulgin, who with her husband, Leon, are part of a custom cutter team headed by her parents, Perry and Candice Hoffman. Sage Sammons is the third blogger. He and his family are also veterans of custom harvesting and this year have harvested for growers in Texas, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana.
The All Aboard Wheat Harvest is sponsored in part by DuPont Crop Protection. “My family has been involved in custom harvesting since my great-grandfather on my mom’s side started the business in 1950,” says Jenna. “My dad hired on with the crew. He fell in love with my mom, they got married and continued the business. My two sisters and I have always made the harvest tour with them.”
Her family’s harvest venture has included stops in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado. Jada’s family has harvested in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, South Dakota and North Dakota. “We’ve had a pretty easy summer,” says Jenna, a journalism major in college. “Probably the strangest things we saw were wild pigs field at Hamlin, TX. We haven’t had to deal with that before.”
She likes the relationships her family has established with growers over the years. “Farmers are good people,” she says. “They get along with most everyone. Small town communities welcome us with open arms. That’s one of the best things about our travels.”
For more on the All Aboard Wheat Harvest tour, go to http://www.allaboardharvest.com/.