WELLINGTON ? Any other year would find custom cutter Dave Hermesch a busy man, joining the hundreds of other agricultural nomads whose combines follow the ripening crops of the wheat harvest.

But the work normally awaiting the Coweta, Okla., man and his 12-person crew is literally drying up, the latest blow dealt by the wilting drought that has devastated the harvest.

“Usually if the drought or hail isn’t too widespread, we can load our combines and go somewhere else to replace lost acres,” said Hermesch, who also is board president of the Hutchinson-based trade group U.S. Custom Harvesters. “But not when it is as big and as widespread as this is now.”

As farm equipment costs skyrocketed, custom harvesters carved out livings by buying fleets of combines, which they used to cut fields for farmers reluctant to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for machinery used only a week or two each season.

These hardy crews survived and many even flourished as the business was passed from generation to generation without crop insurance or a farm bill to back them up. Today an estimated 500 custom harvesters earn their incomes by cutting crops from land farmed by others.

They faced many of the same problems that plague the farm economy, and often found creative ways to stay afloat.

For example, when it grew difficult to find domestic laborers willing to work long hours on the move, custom cutters looked overseas. They found mostly grown farm children from Australia and South Africa who wanted to see the world by helping with combines and grain trucks in the United States.

But so devastating is this drought, cutters say, that for some, this harvest may be the last.

Jim Maddy farms his own ground in Norton, Kan., when he’s not cutting for others.

At the start of the Kansas wheat harvest, Maddy pulled his combines and trucks from Oklahoma into Kansas to cut his own crop before moving to Colorado, Nebraska and South Dakota. He estimates losing 5,000 acres of custom cutting to the drought.

His cutting business broke even the past two years after a small profit the previous year. About 20 years ago, custom cutting was profitable back when combines cost half as much as they do now, he said.

“Thank God I don’t have big debts,” he said. “Seems like we always find a way to make it.”

Hermesch’s run normally begins in May with the winter wheat harvest in Texas and runs through Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, North Dakota and South Dakota before ending with the last of the fall crops in December.

By season’s end, he and his crew would normally have cut nearly 35,000 acres. This year, he has already lost at least 6,000 acres and he says there is nowhere to go to make up the losses.

Some cutters have lost as many as four stops in their winter wheat run, and the harvest is slim from many of the fields that they do cut. Cutters are paid based on the number of bushels cut and hauled.

“If we don’t try to get something for them, they are absolutely finished,” he said. “There is no way they can survive.”

U.S. Custom Harvesters is surveying its membership to gather loss estimates, with hopes of getting cutters included in any government drought assistance program.

“If we don’t get some assistance for custom harvesters, we are going to lose 50 percent of the custom harvesters out there who are going to go broke and quit,” he said.

Making it tougher still are recent changes in government regulations which toughen the requirements for qualifying for disaster loans, Hermesch said. One such change requires harvesters to live in the area where the disaster is proclaimed, he said.

Cutters also are trying to change crop insurance rules to allow them to buy catastrophic policies just like farmers.

“There are too many guys losing too much money,” Hermesch said. “Take myself, this will be three out of four years I’ve had a bad run. If we don’t pull this off this year, I don’t know if we will make it. I don’t know if we would want to, number one. We’ve lost so much money, why would I do it?”