Before today’s topic, there’s some good news. As of last Thursday, all of Kansas is out of drought conditions and only a small area east of here is rated as abnormally dry. That includes a sliver of Barton, most of Rice and part of Northern Reno County. Unless the weather turns of exceptionally hot and dry, everything is in position soil moisture wise for a good wheat crop. Also there is good moisture to plant corn, soybean, and grain sorghum into and provide for good early growth.  
Today’s title may seem a little odd since there really isn’t anything to harvest right now. That’s because even to those who know little about crop production, know wheat isn’t ready, corn is still going in the ground, and soybean/grain sorghum planting hasn’t even started here. You may think knowing when crops are ready to harvest isn’t all that complicated but it’s much more complicated than you think. Consider the following:
• For grain and oil seed crops, producers look for two stages. First is physiological maturity of the seed. Simply put, this is the stage where the seed is capable of germinating and producing a new plant. However, the moisture content of the seed is much too high to harvest the seed without harvest difficulties or spoilage. You need to wait for harvest moisture which is much lower. If some factor causes you to harvest early, you have the added expense of drying the grain down to prevent spoilage.
• The other type of harvest involves crops such as alfalfa or other hay or forage crops. Here you balance the quantity of the crop with the quality of the crop. Maximum tonnage means lower quality and maximum quality means lower tonnage. Producers seek to find that balance where tonnage and quality are both optimized. If they want multiple harvests of the same forage, they harvest it so as to not damage the plants ability to regrow.
• This coming Friday, May 13, graduates will walk across the stage at Barton Community College. To finish the analogy, they are physiologically mature, ready to be planted and grow in their careers or further higher education. But unlike those seeds, graduates are never really at that true harvest moisture, finished. They are never “ripe.” If you compare graduates to forages the analogy works a bit better. You seek that balance in learning where students have a quality education while realizing you can never reach the desired quantity of learning. So you look to “harvest” that “crop” in a manner that facilitates lifelong learning, the ability to keep growing in their profession. In today’s world of higher education, graduation is just the end of the beginning, not the beginning of end of learning.