The sun’s first rays are spilling over Jumbo Mountain when the team clambers aboard the sprawling corn harvester. John Harold joins the pickers as they twist his “Olathe Sweet” sweet corn from the ...

Harvesting corn in a $300,000, eight-row combine is a solitary, highly mechanized business. Such was not always the case. Up through the late 1930s, most corn was picked not by machine, but by hand.

“Two rows at a time, slow and dirty” is how Chad Coleman describes his corn harvest. He’s surrounded by crunching, brittle corn plants, dust, parts of shredded stalks and leaves, and a deafening noise ...

Randy Kruse pulls an old two-row corn picker, which removes the corn from the stalks and augers it into a wagon. Corn is dumped into the Kruses’ corncrib. The corn will dry there and later be ground ...

The tractor coughed but didn’t catch, so the old farmer on the ground yelled up to the old farmer behind the wheel. “The black button,” Don Magee said. “You push it in.” And then it roared to life, an ...

How does the sweet corn business work in Iowa? Richard DeMoss, a Gilbert-area farmer who has driven into Ames for the last 39 years to sell the stuff that Iowans crave, can tell you. First you need ...

Don Magee, who farms southeast of Lincoln, found and has restored a 1940s single-row corn picker. He tried it out in front of his neighbors Monday afternoon. Larry Gottula tries to fix a slipping belt ...