The harvest window farmers were waiting for finally opened up in mid-October, allowing significant progress in corn and soybean harvest after wet weather sidelined combines since late September.

“People really hit beans hard for the last two weeks,” Chet Vander Velde, an O’Brien County Farm Bureau member, said Oct. 25. “I would say beans are probably 90 percent out around here and corn is probably at 35 percent.”

Farmers put in long days and late nights, and many dealt with...