The Buddy Seat I Gave My Granddaughter

The Yield Monitor

Up on the post to the right of my seat there is a screen. The yield monitor. I can see it without taking my eyes far off the field.

It is the brain of the whole business. And it is the thing that turned Ava from a passenger into a partner.

“See that screen?” I said. “That is the single most important job in this cab, and nobody’s doing it right now. I need somebody on it.”

Her eyes went to the screen and then to me.

“Can you read me numbers?” I said. “Loud, over the engine, so I hear you.”

She unbuckled enough to lean, and I showed her the two numbers that matter.

“That top one, that is bushels per acre. That is how good the ground is giving.”

“That bottom one is moisture, how wet the corn is. That tells us whether it is dry enough to sell, or whether we have to pay the elevator to dry it.”

“What’s good?” she asked. She was already a farmer, asking the right question.

“Round here, on good ground, two hundred bushels an acre is a year you smile about,” I said. “This north eighty, your great grandpa’s ground, it has given me as high as two hundred and twenty.”

“Moisture, we want under eighteen or so, or they dock us.”

So Ava sat forward with her little hands on the sill below that screen. She called me the numbers, every pass, in a voice that got surer every minute.

“Two hundred and six, Grandma. Moisture seventeen point four.”

“Two hundred and nineteen now. Still seventeen point four.”

“Grandma, it jumped to two twenty six, is that good, is that real?”

“That is the low end of the field by the crick,” I told her. “The ground’s richer down there. You are reading it exactly right. That is real.”

She kept a running tally in her head of our best pass. She announced it to me like a ballgame score.

She told me when the moisture ticked up near the fence line, where the shade kept the corn wet. She caught it before I did, twice.

“How’d you know?” I asked her, when she called the wet spot before the screen did.

“The corn looks different,” she said. “Greener. Heavier.” She was right. She was watching the field and the screen both, the way a real operator learns to.

By the time we were halfway through the north eighty, I was not teaching her anymore. She was doing a job, a real job, the kind that if you do it wrong costs a farmer real money.

And she was doing it well.

“You know what you are doing right now?” I said. “You are doing the smartest job in this whole cab. Any fool can drive. Dale used to say that. The money is in the monitor.”

She sat up a half inch taller. “Did Grandpa Dale let you run the monitor?”

“He taught me on it,” I said. “Right where you’re sitting. That is the buddy seat’s whole reason. It is not for riding along. It is for learning to run the thing.”