Scott Legried, pictured above, received help from friends and neighbors to harvest his soybean crop last week. Legried, who suffered an accident on Aug. 15, is still recovering from the injuries he sustained.

It has been said that true friendship isn’t about being there when it is convenient, it is about being there when it’s not.

On Tuesday, Oct. 4, some neighbors and friends of Scott Legried took a break from harvesting their own crops to harvest 240 acres of soybeans for Legried.

Legried needed help because he is still recovering from an accident he suffered on Aug. 15.

“I was south of Elmore heading back home,” Legried, who lives south of Frost, just two miles north of the Iowa border, comments. “I swerved to avoid hitting a dog and ended up going in the ditch with my dump truck I use to haul gravel.”

Legried shares the truck ended up on its side and the result of the accident limited him on what he could do.

“I laid there and asked the Good Lord for help,” he recalls. “Within five minutes I heard a woman’s voice say hello. I answered hello back. She asked if I needed help and I replied I did. She said she was going to call 911 and it was at that point I knew I would be OK.”

Legried was surprised at the number of emergency people who showed up.

“There must have been close to 30 people there,” he says. “There was a State Trooper and emergency personnel from Elmore, Bancroft, Iowa, and Lakota, Iowa.”

Tim Steier is one of those who showed up at the accident scene. Steier had been waiting for Legried at a gravel pit on Legried’s land and became concerned when his friend did not show up.

“He called my phone while I was still in the truck and someone heard my phone ringing on the ground near the truck and answered it,” Legried explains. “After Tim learned what happened he came down to check on me. Later, he was also at the hospital to check up on me.”

Legried said if it wasn’t for the injuries he sustained in the accident he would have been able to get himself out of the truck.

“They ended up taking me out the front window,” he comments. “They were going to use a harness on me and one of the medical people told me it was going to hurt. I said fine, let’s get it over with.”

Legried would end up passing out when they extracted him from his truck.

“I came to when they were putting me into the ambulance and I remember getting scanned at the hospital,” he says.

Legried’s list of injuries was extensive.

“I had seven stitches and eight staples to close up my cuts,” he comments. “I had a broken right collarbone and a broken left scapula. I fractured my left shoulder blade and have seven broken ribs on my left side and one broken rib on my right side. I also punctured a lung and cracked two vertebrae in my neck.”

Dr. Wong was on call and told Legried he was going to be flown to Rochester.

“He said, ‘We are a little hospital and you need to go to a big hospital,'” Legried says. “It was a smooth helicopter ride. Once I arrived at Methodist Hospital I had to be scanned again. The next morning they took me into surgery to clean me up and get the gravel out of my wounds.”

Once Legried was back home different neighbors began calling him and asking if he would need help with harvest.

“I can walk fine but right now I can only raise my left arm to about a 90 degree angle,” Legried explains. “And riding in a bumpy field with cracked ribs is not any fun.”

So, the Frost farmer kept a list of those who had offered to help and later gave it to the local cooperative just across the border in Rake, Iowa.

“Lori Osland, who works at the co-op, made the necessary calls to get a harvest day organized,” Legried says.

It was not the first time Osland had organized a group of farmers to assist with Legried’s harvest.

“My father died 11 years ago and it was Lori who also organized workers to help harvest the crop back then,” he comments.

A total of 15-16 people showed up to help on Oct. 4, along with their equipment, which included four combines, three semis and three grain carts. The group also utilized Legried’s two straight trucks to haul the grain to town.

“All of the beans were hauled directly to Rake,” Legried mentions. “It only took four or five hours for them to get everything done.”

Legried also has about 240 acres of corn to harvest and a group is being organized to help get the rest of his crop out of the field later this fall.

“The accident is something I do not want to go through again, but it could have been a lot worse,” Legried says. “I am just thankful for all of the neighbors that helped. I hope they know how thankful I am and I hope to be able to help them someday.”