Harvest is starting to near the end on this farm. Several rain delays and generally wet ground conditions have slowed us down, but we’ve got less than 10% to go.
Wet Harvest
We have had to return to many of our fields multiple times to get crop out due to both grain and ground moisture. A cool, wet finish to summer didn’t dry the corn down very fast so we had to hunt around for dry corn. This is a field we almost finished this week. Had to leave 9 acres of 133 for later. As you can see we had been here before a few weeks earlier and backed out. We have quite a few ruts to fix in a lot of our fields. Thankfully only one no-till field was rutted up very much. Now if it would just dry up enough for us to get some tillage tools to work.
Same field, new ruts. I stopped short of the far North end before the ground got too soft. The problem was driving on my previous completed pass to head towards the truck to unload. Sometimes when it’s wet on the farm the first pass isn’t the one that gets you. The combine can also behave differently depending on how much grain its carrying. Here I was near full. Had I been empty I may not have had an issue. Combine and head weigh almost 20 tons empty, but a full grain tank can add another 10 tons. Makes a difference!
Pretty much had it in up to the frame here. This is the second time this season the grain cart has been able to come unload me and I’ve been able to drive out without needing pulled. It went down quick this time. Usually I can see, feel, and hear the combine working into softer and softer soil, but this time it only took a couple of seconds.
The grain cart is quite heavy too. Fully loaded it can have 60,000lbs of corn on it which is a lot for the tractor to be pulling on soft ground. In some fields we’ve had to keep the cart light so we know it can get around without getting stuck. We also take care to keep it on the same track as the combine and usually follow the same path to the road for unloading. It’s better to really mess up one area instead of driving around all over and messing everything up a little bit.
Plotting
Weaver Popcorn rents some ground out of one of our popcorn fields each year to plant a test plot. This week they came in with their specialized test plot combines to harvest the plot. Eventually they had three machines going to get done. They are running behind because of the weather just like everyone else around here.
Cover Up
Our farm now has some fields going into their third year of cover cropping. In the fields where we had radishes seeded last fall we have seen radishes that did not germinate in 2013. We know this because they can’t survive the winter. When 2014 brought warm weather they sprouted and began to grow. I wish we could get the fall planting to grow this big! In fact this year we planted 100 acres with early maturing soybeans hoping to harvest them early and drill a cover into the soil. Wet weather slowing harvest also made seeding with a drill not feasible in wet soil so we ended up flying on all our cover before harvest except for one field where we had cereal rye spread with fall fertilizer post-harvest.
Sunlight and warmth have been in short supply since our cover crops were seeded, but here you can see winter cereal rye sprouting in a corn field.
Hauling Grain
One night this week as I pulled the combine in at the end of the day. Dad is unloading trucks, manning the dryer, and transferring corn to from the dryer to other bins.
That box is the control panel for the corn dryer. I’m in the combine for almost 100% of harvest, but I should probably spend some more time here learning how to run the thing.
Dad had help Saturday afternoon keeping the trucks rolling back to the field.
I hauled one load in to town and got to see the completed corn storage pile at The Andersons. They have another pile that is covered. I’m not sure if they’ll cover this one or if they plan on moving by truck or train soon. It’s pretty neat to catch them loading trucks from the pile. A tractor with a belt conveyor backs into the pile and it will fill a 1,000 bushel grain truck in a couple of minutes.
The final farm picture this week is probably the first photo I took this week. One of the seed companies we grow for called for 9 loads of the soybeans we grew for them. Normally we don’t get this call until after the first of the year, but it nice to have half the bin delivered already.
Harvest may wrap up next week. Corn will surely be done early in the week, but we’ll have to see if our double crop soybeans planted in July after wheat harvest area ready to cut. We tried them last week and they weren’t at all suitable for harvest yet.
