Harvest

Harvest was the seventeenth UNSC colony world, and one of the most remote. The colony was founded in 2468 by the UNSC Skidbladnir. Located in the Epsilon Indi System, the planet had the unfortunate distinction of being the first human planet discovered and destroyed by the Covenant. After disastrous First Contact, the planet was subsequently glassed by the Covenant during the First Battle of Harvest, but most of its population managed to escape in freighters.

Background
Harvest was one of the UNSC's more productive and peaceful colonies. Within two decades of its founding, it had the highest per capital agricultural manufacture of any inner colony. Major crops, such as corn, wheat, watermelons, peaches, apples, grapes, and numerous other foodstuffs nourished the inhabitants of more than half a dozen other colonies. By 2524 the population of Harvest was three hundred thousand, but most were killed by the Covenant in 2525 by invasion and orbital bombardment. The capital city and its largest population center was Utgard, also home to Harvest's seven space elevators connected to the Orbital Space Station, Tiara.

Topography
Harvest was a small planet, approximately one-third the size of Earth with only a 4,000 kilometer (2,484 mile) equatorial diameter, slightly smaller than the Sol planet Mercury. In terms of surface area, Harvest possessed ~50 million km², roughly one-tenth the surface area of Earth. Harvest orbited Epsilon Indi extremely quickly, much faster than most other UNSC colonies, at roughly 150,000 km/h, or ~41km/sec (by comparison, Earth orbits Sol at roughly 30 km/sec). Harvest had no natural satellites. Out of a total of five planets in the Epsilon Indi System, Harvest was the only habitable planet, as well as being fertile for farming. The super-continent Edda dominated the planet, taking up roughly 67% of its surface. Two low-salinity seas covered the remainder of the planet, Hugin to the north, and Munin to the south. Almost 86% of Edda is within 500 meters of sea level, the only major change in elevation is the Bifrost, an escarpment that "cuts" Edda in half.

Harvest's surface was once beautiful, covered in grassland and forests, lush fields and rolling hills, and a thousand lakes swarming with fish. The orchards with luscious crops. At night, bats filled the skies. After being glassed, the surface was reduced to a layer of melted glass, the destruction visible from orbit. The environment suffered a catastrophic blow as a result, the once glorious landscape turning into a nearly frozen tundra, causing most species to quickly go extinct. Soon, all that remained of Harvest's original ecosystem were the scavengers, feeding off the rotting remains of the planet's once abundant wildlife, and even they perished before long.

Ecology of Harvest

 * Harvest Whale
 * Starling
 * Bat

The Forerunners
Some time before the Forerunner-Flood War, the Forerunners visited the world and buried an artifact in the planet's arctic region, apparently some kind of star map.

UNSC Breadbasket
In 2502, Avery Junior Johnson was involved in the assassination of Jerald Mulkey Ander, the head of the People's Occupation Government on Harvest as part of the ORION Project's Operation KALEIDOSCOPE. Harvest was the first colony to be attacked by the Covenant and the first human world to be glassed. It was also the first place humanity officially made contact with the Covenant, after the incidents on This End Up and Minor Transgression.

In 2524, Staff Sergeant Johnson returned to Harvest along with Staff Sergeant Byrne and Captain Ponder, all survivors of Operation: TREBUCHET. They were to train a Colonial Militia and, unbeknownst to them, fend off what UNSC had believed to be Insurrectionist attacks on ships in the systems.

On February 3rd, 2525, the Harvest orbital platform, the Tiara, made long-range radar and spectroscopic contact with Rapid Conversion. Contact with Harvest was lost thereafter.

Escape from Harvest
The citizens of Harvest soon found themselves in the middle of the first battle between the Covenant and humanity, using their newly trained Militia to herd hundreds of thousands of civilian survivors from Gladsheim, Vigrond and other locations to the Utgard Space Elevators to escape the planet. During the first Covenant attack on Harvest about 250,000+ humans managed to escape the planet by packing into 236 freight containers which were then loaded into seven elevator depots in Utgard. Every five to seven minutes, seven pairs of freight containers were loaded into the Space Elevator. Loaded ahead of these freight containers were seven "grease buckets", maintenance containers, two which were loaded with Johnson's men and Jilan al-Cygni. The other five were decoys rigged with claymore mines which were used to soften the Brutes, Grunts and Drones which had boarded and taken control of Tiara. While the other two "grease buckets" holding Johnson and Co. stopped and they were fighting off the Covenant, the number seven strand of the Space Elevator snapped a few thousand kilometers above its anchor due to the stress caused by the load becoming unbalanced. There were 11 pairs of freight containers on the strand when it snapped, killing around 40,000 people. The remaining freight containers carrying the survivors of Harvest continued up the elevator, out into space, where they met up with propulsion pods that Sif had placed previously. Once Johnson and Co. finished fighting the Covenant on the Tiara, they joined the survivors and used the propulsion pods to enter Slipspace. It should be noted that at least one of the future candidates for SPARTAN-III Program could have been on the freight containers.

At the time of these occurrences the prototype of the Brute Chopper vehicle was also made by a Huragok Engineer named Lighter Than Some. However these were destroyed by JOTUNs commanded by the AI Mack.

After the destruction of the Tiara the agricultural AI Mack buried its strands in a form of a funerary ritual for Sif who he appeared to be in love with.

The Battle of Harvest
By April 12th, 2525, the Colonial Military Administration sent the scout ship Argo to investigate. Other then confirming its arrival at Harvest no other transmissions were sent, and the Argo was presumed MIA.

On October 7th, 2525, Fleet Command assembled Battlegroup 4 to investigate, due to the fact that the Harvest situation was deemed to have become serious. The battle group consisted of the destroyer Heracles, commanded by Captain Veredi, as well as the frigates Arabia and Vostok. They entered the Harvest system only to find the planet's surface almost entirely melted down to glass. While there, the battle group encountered the Rapid Conversion. This vessel immediately fired on the inferior human vessels, and the Vostok and Arabia were lost with all hands. The Heracles managed to jump out of the system, but took several weeks to return to Reach due to damage sustained in the battle. Upon hearing Veredi's report and realizing the scale of the threat, the UNSC was placed on full alert and a fleet was assembled to meet the threat.

Vice Admiral Preston Cole fought and barely won the Second Battle of Harvest in 2526. The UNSC was able to retake the planet but with the loss of 2/3 of their fleet, even when they had outnumbered the single Covenant ship in Harvest orbit.



Five years later in 2531, the Covenant attacked again. Cole led a second group of ships, including the UNSC Spirit of Fire into the system and neutralized the Covenant force. They later discovered that the Covenant had established a presence on the planet's surface, and more shockingly, had uncovered the previously unknown Forerunner relic.

Inconsistencies

 * When the colony is first mentioned in The Fall Of Reach, it is described by Admiral Stanforth as having “a population of approximately 3 million”. This was later revised to about 300 thousand in Halo: Contact Harvest
 * There is also ambiguity as to whether the planet was truly glassed by The Covenant in 2525. Typically, a planet that has been glassed is left a barren, uninhabitable wasteland with no atmosphere. Yet, Admiral Cole lost several ships and spent almost five years fighting to regain this supposedly-dead world. It seems unlikely that such an operation would be undertaken if Harvest was destroyed, unless Cole’s forces simply intended to engage and defeat any Covenant force and Harvest was simply the site of the battle. However, Halo Wars seems to suggest that Harvest was devastated, but not glassed. The atmosphere is breathable, the poles are still frozen enough to allow snow to fall and battles take place in ruined human settlements. It is now known that most of the planet was glassed, like Reach, with only the northern-most region spared because of the risk of damaging a Forerunner artifact the Covenant later returned to uncover.
 * Prior to Halo: Contact Harvest, there is no indication that there were any Harvest colony survivors or that Avery Johnson was among them.
 * Little information regarding the Jiralhanae on Harvest seems to have made it back to the UNSC, as they are still considered a new Covenant race when encountered on the Unyielding Hierophant in 2552.
 * Halo Wars depicts Harvest having frozen poles, but Mack indicated in his final transmissions that the "nuclear winter" effect caused by the Covenant's Glassing was the first snow the planet had ever seen. Perhaps, since Halo Wars takes place some years later, the poles have frozen over permanently as result.

Trivia

 * Harvest is seemingly inspired by the Norse and Scandinavian outlying cultures and customs, they were practical hard-laborers fairly comparable to Harvest's populace as is one of its A.I.s, Sif.
 * It has numerous Norse mythological locations such as Gladsheim, Bifrost and Utgard amongst others.
 * The first UNSC casualty was a young Colonial Militia soldier named Osmo who was killed when a pack of Grunts ambushed him.
 * Harvest may be named for its agricultural resources because its main commerce/trade is crops.
 * The finding of Humans on Harvest was the catalyst for the attempted Covenant genocide of the Human race, due to a mistranslation of Forerunner glyphs by the Prophets, as seen on many writs and machines amid Covenant technologies.
 * Harvest had no army when the Covenant attacked, only its Colonial Militia, which had been raised for possible Insurrection attacks, was stationed on the planet. There would have been a more efficient force, if not for the attitudes of the people: they didn't want armed guards all over their planet.
 * Many of the population of Harvest were of American descent. Specifically, the Mid-Western states (Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan) of the United States of America. This is the reason for Harvest's agricultural economy and largely North-European culture.
 * Harvest is approximately 1/3 the size of Earth, and has a day/night cycle only 17.5 Sol hours long.