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Simulation tools have become popular for manufacturing environments, allowing potential decisions to be rapidly evaluated and compared. There are parallels between the conventional manufacturing and agricultural harvests. Manufacturing uses largely stationary equipment processing material coming into the facility; agriculture uses mobile processing elements combines to digest material spatially distributed across the field. A simulation of the harvest was developed in the ARENA manufacturing simulation language. This paper describes the development and configuration of the simulation. The simulation was validated using data gathered during a 2001 Kansas wheat harvest. A companion paper describes the application of the simulation to compare several scenarios.