In early August, after a full day of cutting lentils in eastern Montana, Tracy and Jim Zeorian, the married team that make up Zeorian Harvesting, completed the 45-minute drive back to their camper in Jordan, Montana, population 343. They had finished early that day, so the fact that some light still hung in the sky was unusual. But Tracy’s day was far from over. In addition to running the combine that is the centerpiece of their operation and preparing meals for her and Jim, Tracy has become a prominent advocate for custom harvesters, the itinerant workers who hire out their services and are responsible for cutting most of America’s commodity crops, including wheat, soybeans, and corn.
When her work in the field is over for the day, Tracy returns to camp, where she administers multiple blogs and Facebook pages that promote the industry and facilitate information sharing between harvesters spread out across remote corners of the Great Plains.
Late that evening, she posted an article to one of her pages, HarvestHER, about the suicide of a prominent Canadian farmer and agricultural advocate. By the next morning, she had received an email from Audra Zimmerman, the wife of a former harvester, who had joined the community the previous year.
[For more on this story by Michael Dax, go to https://www.yesmagazine.org/pl...agriculture-20181002]
Comments (0)