Harvest began this week! And that’s pretty much what we’ve been up to! In a post earlier this week I talked about what kind of yields we’ve seen so far as a result of the drought. Different soil types have different capacities for yield, but this year the changes from one part of a field to another are more strident than normal. I’ve seen corn range from 30 bushels to over 300 in a single pass about a quarter of a mile long.
Corn!
- Sometimes I get help in the cab.
- The combine after the first day of harvest.
- Where corn once stood.
- This is the monitor that moves between the planter tractor and combine. Ignore the terrible yield numbers it’s showing! This box keeps track of a great many things which will be very useful to us in planning crops for years to come. It’s also the interface for the GPS guidance system. The white line is the track the combine follows all by itself, and you can see the blue lines extrapolated to the left and right are more tracks evenly spaced based on the working width of my equipment.
- This is me in the cab. Monitor up above and my tablet mounted in the window to keep up with social media, etc.
- 1000lbs of ryegrass seed arrived from Oregon this week. We will be using this for a cover crop. It came from the farm of fellow ag blogger Oregon Green! Learn more about cover crops from Plant Cover Crops.
- Getting the grain cart ready to go. The cart will drive along side the combine in the field so we can unload on the move instead of having the combine quit harvesting to unload onto a truck. We don’t use it all the time, but it gets used quite a lot. Even if there isn’t someone around to drive the cart it’s handy to have at the edge of the field if trucks aren’t getting back to the field as fast as the combine can harvest.
- The platform we use to cut soybeans is 35′ wide. Way to big to take on the road attached to the combine. It goes on a special trailer to move between fields. The corn head is 20′ wide and often stays on the combine for travel although we have a trailer for it as well.
- This field is finished. I’m about to set the head on the trailer to move on to the next field.
- In the tractor pulling the grain cart chasing down the combine! The drawback of the grain cart is that even though it has very large tires it will be one of the heaviest if not the heaviest thing in the field all year. That means soil compaction. I try to stay in other wheel tracks as much as possible. No shortcuts diagonally across the field!
