Wheat Harvest 2019
We grow soft red winter wheat which is planted in the fall, and harvested the following summer. Usually harvest begins the first week of July which was true again in 2019. Wheat was growing during the cool, wet spring of corn and soybean planting so it was slow to develop.
We did get started before July 4th, but we shut down and enjoyed a long holiday weekend so grain moisture would come down. Too much moisture takes too much of a drying cost penalty at the elevator. The quality of our crop was very good this year. Some of the best if not the best I’ve harvested personally.
Yields were down though because we had wet conditions from when the wheat was planted all through its lifespan. But the price was better than normal, and we had sold a few thousand bushels on contract months ago for an excellent price. We are not big time wheat growers. Growing 242 acres this year which is actually about three times what we normally raise. We started growing it because we needed acreage without crops in the summer to empty manure from our hog barns. We got out of hogs about 15 years ago so we kind of joke we just grow wheat because it’s pretty! It can be hard to make this crop profitable, but we generally plant double crop soybeans right after harvest. The soybeans usually bring a very good profit overall even if the wheat takes a loss
Great video! It’s amazing all that a combine gets done in one pass; cutting, separating, temporarily storing and offloading the grain. Sure beats great-great grandad, swinging a sythe, doesn’t it? Speaking of that, I have a sythe that goes back to at least my great-grandfather and, probably, to his dad. It was used a lot in Vigo County in the 1800s.
That’s a cool bit of history!