Meals in the field and hats in combines: a look into end of harvest traditions

Oct 14, 2025

The end of harvest is a special, but stressful time in Saskatchewan. For farmers, it’s the busiest season of the year where a full spring and summer’s worth of work culminate in the final push to get the crop out of the field and into the bin before the snow starts to fly.

Pests, disease, yields, moisture levels, inclement weather, malfunctioning equipment, field fires, all of those worries can finally come off a farmer’s shoulders for a few months before doing it all over again. As the final swipes of the crop are taken off the field, a lot of farm families have traditions they follow to celebrate the end of harvest, right there in the field. During a busy harvest season, it gives the crew in the field a chance to stop being coworkers and simply just be a family.

For my family in the Wilkie area, one of our end-of-harvest traditions was always a meal in the field. On the last field of harvest, Mom and Grandma would put together a feast for my dad, brothers, uncle, and farmhands in the field, pack everything in sealed heat safe containers and wrap them up tight to make sure nothing spilled out on the bumpy gravel roads, then load it up in the truck with some plastic chairs and a table to set up a family supper in the field.

As Mom and Grandma pulled up into the field, grain trucks and combines would gather around, and suddenly a noisy field that was alive with the sounds of combines threshing and grain truck engines was quiet as the dust settled. The table was set up for everyone to eat with the endgate of a truck serving as a buffet table, and under the purples and oranges of a Saskatchewan harvest sunset, we’d all relax for a few moments and enjoy a meal together, with the only interruption coming from the odd neighbour driving by and giving us a honk along the way.

Click here to see more...

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.