Peter Welte, North Dakota's newest U.S. district judge, balances new role with farming Monday, November 18, 2019
G.F. Herald
Ice-encrusted soybeans fly over the combine hopper and skitter across the frozen ground as Peter Welte readies the combine to harvest his crop.
Chopping iced-in soybeans off the machine’s sensor plate, along with fueling up the combine with cold-thickened diesel fuel that flows into the combine at a snail’s pace, are irritations that have come with the 2019 harvest season. Welte’s soybean harvest, like that of other farmers across eastern North Dakota, was delayed by more than a month because rain and snow made fields too muddy to support equipment.
Welte seems to take it all in stride, though, chatting with visitors while squeezing hard on the grease gun trigger to get the nearly solid lubricant out of it and onto the combine zerks. A farmer since he was a teenager, Welte has been through challenging harvest seasons before , and knows he probably will again.