Farm Week in Pictures 02/22/2014

This is pretty much a soybean exclusive Farm Week in Pictures. The majority of our time this week was devoted to hauling a bin full of soybeans 21 miles away to Remington Seeds who we’ve been raising seed beans with for a few years now. We are growing seed for two companies now, and in 2013 the majority of our soybean acres were grown for seed.

When we raise seed it’s importmant we take a few extra steps during the year to ensure a quality product. One of the main things we must do when working with seed is to have all equipment clean from planting and harvest to storage facilities and trucking. For this week’s load we don’t want anything going in the truck that isn’t a CR3222N soybean. That means the trailers were looked over an cleaned out of any seed hung up in the hoppers from previous loads. Raising crops for seed nets us a premium price for our extra efforts.

When we raise seed we have to deliver the harvest when the seed company calls on us. We don’t quite get to deliver on our own time like the rest of our crop. This truck is nearly full and ready to take off! And that’s a relief because getting these beans out of the bin was a battle for a couple of days. The aeration fan that serves this bin also is ducted to another bin. After harvest we needed to run some air through the beans, but do to a simple mistake air was blocked from reaching the bean bin. Unfortunately now, almost 4 months after harvest, we developed a few spoiled soybeans which plugged the gates in the floor that let beans flow out of the bin. After almost two full days of poking and prodding to get soybeans moving again, the last two loads come out of the bin just fine like the first day’s seed did. It should take around half an hour to load a truck here, but the one you see here took three hours! It was a lot of extra work, but in the end we still delivered very good beans and didn’t have a problem with any of the loads not being up to standards. It does’t take much to clog a bin, but it can take a lot of effort to get things moving again.

When the pile of grain gets low enough gravity is no longer enough to empty a bin. This is where we come in to move grain to the sumps in the floor by hand. We’ll also fix a sweep auger to the center hole once enough grain has moved out to completely uncover the hole. The sweep slowly moves around the bin while we clean up behind it. Two full truckloads of shoveling and sweep auger cleaned out the bottom of this bin.

Here I am sitting on the scales and having my load sampled for purity, damage, and moisture. After the weight is recorded I pull in and start unloading. I’ll hit the scales again on the way out of the plant, and pick up a ticket showing how much the soybeans weighed.

Inside being unloaded!

As our soybeans were coming in other beans were headed out on trucks on their way to other farmers for the 2014 growing season.

We worked late two nights hauling in soybeans. Our bin troubles were putting the seed plant in a bind too because they had other varieties of soybeans from other growers scheduled to come in after us. They have to clean all their equipment the same as we do to be sure the product they deliver is what the farmers ordered.

The results of the week’s work! 18 scale tickets. One for each load delivered. Based on a bin measurement Remington estimated we had 17,000 bushels of soybeans for them this year. The scale tickets added up to 17,067 bushels. That’s awfully close! Rough figuring by the planting populations we use comes out to around one bushel of soybeans planted per acre. That could vary quite a bit depending on planting population and seed size, but each acre of seed soybeans we raise will become around 60 acres of planting for other farmers the following season!

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