The farm is in full harvest mode.  Not much else is going on except for harvest.  I spend most of my time doing all things combine related.  Dad keeps the corn dryer running and transfers corn between bins and checks fields and grain to see if we need to tweak any combine settings.  Grandpa and Randy handle trucking and grain cart duty.  Last week was all soybeans and this week has been all corn.  Check it out!

Great Weather

Harvest weather was pretty great up until Saturday when we were rained out.  But we have cover crops growing too so rain is good!  If you look close between these corn rows you can see the green oats and tillage radish covers growing.  I took this shot while standing on top of the combine waiting for the grain cart to unload me.

Down Time

Here the combine is parked in the same spot as the above picture only I’ve turned around.  My grain tank is really full of corn!  I need to split this field a couple of times so I can give the grain cart access to unload me going both directions.  This field is a bit long and the yield meant in pounds I was harvesting about 1.5 times the capacity of the grain tank on each pass.  I’m a little over halfway through at this point.

So yeah, I had time to take quite a few pictures here.  I also took this time to walk around behind the combine to see if I had any grain loss on the ground.  The combine was pretty well dialed in for this field because I couldn’t find anything on the ground here.  That means all the money is going in the tank and not in the dirt!  As conditions change we need to keep an eye on the combine settings and adjust them accordingly.  Sometimes you can spot a corn field turning green again after harvest if there was a lot of grain loss.

Still in the same spot here, just 30′ to the East.  When I’m splitting a field or opening up end rows on a field of corn I have to notch out a space when I get full so the grain cart can get me unloaded and I can carry on.  Now that we have a 12 row head instead of an 8 row I’m getting full quickly!  Once we are opened up I can really move if the trucks can keep up with me.

In Need of Guidance

We have automated steering in place for planting, fertilizing, tillage, and soybean harvest.  Not until this year did we have auto steer for corn.  I’ve tried to use the GPS auto tracking in corn before without success.  Corn stalks really need to feed straight down into the head otherwise ears of corn will fall out and onto the ground.  GPS is really good, but not so good that the stalks feed well all the time.  I’m talking about a couple inches here.  We finally opened our wallets for Row Sense with the new head.  These two metal feelers are tied to the steering system.  They ride one row of stalks and shift the combine track slightly left and right to stay right on the row.  Even if I start on a straight track and come to a curve along a ditch or power line the combine will follow that curve as long as that particular row is on the same curve.  It took me all of about 5 seconds to appreciate hands free driving in corn.  As I’ve said many times before you’d be surprised how much effort you devote to driving once you stop needing to drive.  Now I can be more focused on how the crop is feeding into the head and into the machine.  (And maybe monitor Facebook and twitter, but I look in short spurts because you’ll get in trouble somehow if you get too wrapped up!)  I’ve found I can get bigger loads on the grain cart while moving because I know where the combine is going and don’t have to be concerned about getting off the row while I’m looking at the cart.

Map It

This map shows were I applied Nitrogen fertilizer to a corn field.  Why didn’t I do the whole field?  The rest of this field was fertilized last fall with manure from the hog barn you see to the North.  The manure ran out before the field was finished so we came in and fertilized the remaining acres with N and spread on dry fertilizer for the other nutrients.  This field has been harvested now so what are the results from two fertility management practices in one field?

This is a yield map of the harvested corn field with the fertilizer map laid over the top.  Along the angled part of my application there was a reduction in yield for a short stretch.  I could actually see this from the combine cab shown by a stretch of significantly shorter corn plants.  The yield in that part of the field dropped below 100 bushels per acre.  The field average was 187 bushels per acre so under 100 is quite a drop.  Why did this happen?  I attribute it to the fact we came in right behind the manure application and I was turning awfully short in an attempt to keep our tractor out of the fresh manure.  Therefore, I probably left what looked like about a 10′ wide gap of corn that didn’t get any fertilizer applied directly to that area.  Overall the field had a great yield, so it didn’t really hurt us much.  Other than that there was no glaringly obvious difference between our application and the manure application from a yield perspective.  I’m less sure about the yellow angle in the Southern half of the field.  The manure was applied on an angle so maybe they had trouble of some sort.  Blue is the top yield, greens are good, and yellow is about average.  With all the data we can log now with precision ag tools we can really analyze things that are happening in our fields and make more informed decisions in the future.

Bin There Done That

Storing our grain properly in grain bins is essential to our operation.  Having clean grain at the right moisture is mission critical to storing for long periods of time.  We are usually still delivering grain right up until the next year’s harvest.  Storage allows us to market our grain for more profit since we don’t have to sell it all when there is abundant supply at harvest and long lines at the elevator.  This photo is a common sight after dark.  We have a “wet” bin that feeds the dryer which will force heated air through the drying bin to bring corn down to 15% moisture needed for storage.  Why not wait until it dries to 15% in the field?  By that time we’d be looking at winter weather keeping us out of the field, and we’d probably lose yield due to ear droppage and lodged plants.

I was on top on bin 7 closing the lid Saturday so I snapped a few photos.  A storm front moves past us to the North in  this shot.  It also indicated I should probably not be making myself the highest point above the ground.

This is popcorn.  The section that has been harvested is a test plot for Pop Weaver.  The Weaver guys spent most of the week here harvesting their 12 acres of tests.  This year there were about 4,000 trails out there.  The harvest is slow and they stop to bag a sample of every test.  We get paid for the acreage of the plot and unless they are growing something odd out there (which they sometimes do) we get the grain as well.  Works out well for us and them.

Their combine may be small, but it’s no less sophisticated than ours.  In “Plotting Popcorn” I showed off how they plant these plots.

My last shot from atop the bin shows the same popcorn field to the right and a corn field we’ve begun to open up on the left.

What do you think of harvest so far?  Leave a comment or question!

 

 

Related articles

• Farm Week in Pictures 09/28/2013
• Well That Was Fun
• An Overview of the Mechanical Reaper
• Awe Inspiring Corn Mazes