Corn Harvest

Never got around to writing about corn harvest until now, a couple of weeks after we finished. I love harvest season since it is when we can see the results of our hard work and the gifts from God, but the days do get long.

This is a view from the combine seat in corn. Corn is planted in rows and the corn head has snouts that direct each and every plant into a set of rollers that pull the stalk down and leave the ear of corn in the head. Lots is happening fast in the head and is a dangerous place to be when running. That is one reason they now install a kill switch on the operator seat. If you get off the seat the corn head will stop in 5 seconds.

Unfortunately not all our corn was standing ice and pretty. Some blew over with the high winds in September. Believe it or not this is looking down rows of corn. Makes it tough to steer the snouts between the corn rows when you can't see the snouts or the rows. If you are wandering why this photo has the silver pipes and yellow fingers and the other doesn't, well that is another part of harvesting, breakdowns.

It seemed like we had lots of breakdowns on the combine this year. Some were mechanical (bearing and broken stripper bar), some were electronic (sensors, switches and wiring harnesses) and some were operator error, me. 

One evening I was starting a new field of my harvest partner and was heading west into the setting sun, combining right down his 12 end rows. All of a sudden I came to a stop. It took me a while to figure out what I hit. The outside row hit a pipe that was buried 4 feet deep. It was part of a stop installed to stop a center pivot irrigation system. It will also stop a combine.

 

It doesn't look that bad on the pipe, but the head does not look so good. It is hard to show on a photo, but I twisted the main frame of the corn head, back and down. The company engineers decided they would have to replace the frame and not straighten it.

Thankfully Fairbanks International, our dealer, found us a new 8-row head to lease while our 12-row head was down. We ended up using the 8-row for the rest of harvest as the new frame has to come from Germany.

This is dumping corn into a grain cart. This was on a Sunday and we don't ask the hired help to run then, so just Don & I combine and truck by ourselves. Oh yes, the neighbor I harvest with is also a Don so we tend to confuse a lot of people.

We have scales on each grain cart to know how much we harvest from each field and how much we put on each truck. We try to load each truck up to the maximum allowed on the roads by Nebraska, but not go over. We have lots of DOT trucks around here and could always get stopped and checked.

We have wireless remote cameras mounted on the combine auger and also on the grain cart tractor so the grain cart operator can see what is going on. This is looking into a truck I just filled with the grain cart. It is much nicer to actually see what you are doing rather than guessing.

 

This was one of the mechanical breakdowns we had. The drive shaft that powers the corn head broke at a U-jooint. This was a weakness in design, we broke 4 of these driveshafts until they finally put a heavier driveshaft on. This killed a couple hours each time it broke.

This is a pictire of my office for the fall. The new combines are quite comfortable with leather heated seats and foot pegs to rest your feet on. Of course it is pressurized to keep the dust out and air-conditioned and heated. 

This was my snack cupboard. These are really nice shelves that I filled with all sorts of candy, snacks etc. It made the loooong days bearable. 

And this is a refrigerator. The combine tech worked a couple days trying to figure out what went wrond with the wiring in the combine since the refrigerator wouldn't work. It isn't quite as petty as it might sound since I also used the same outlet to power a monitor I needed. We ended up running a tag wire from another outlet over to the refrigerator.

This is a picture of the combine monitor. I have six different run screens to choose from to view and all of them are programmable. This is the screen I watch 90% of the time. There are no other gauges or idiot lights, so this monitor serves as the engine monitor, the combine monitor, the guidance system and the yield monitor. It took awhile to figure out what to place on which screen.

This busy handle is the multi-function handle that controls much of the combine functions that change frequently. There 21 different things I can do with these buttons and one button on the back that acts like a shift button. All of these are run by the thumb of the right hand. The handle is also the hydrostat control, which adjust how fast I am driving through the field and which direction I am going.

And that is it, the final rows of corn combined this fall. I was holding my breath the last couple of rounds hoping I would finish before something else went wrong.

And now that harvest is finished, what else do I do the rest of the winter? More blogs to follow.

Soybean Harvest

This has been my view for the last several days and a few more to come. We started soybean harvest on October 1 and have logged eight days so far in the combine seat. I have a few more to go as we still have 320 acres or so to go. We can combine about 120 acres of soybeans a day if we can go all day. The picture above was in a field where the beans are planted in rows that are ridged for gravity irrigation. If you look close you will see green leaves still on the plants. This made combining very tough.

We also have many fields where the soybeans are drilled and there are no ridges. On these you can go whatever direction you want to go. GPS guidance systems make this job much easier and faster. We can always keep a full swath. When I have to steer by hand I always leave a couple of feet on the end of the head so I don't leave strips of beans uncut.

When the sun goes down you keep right on cutting, until the humidity comes up and stops you cold. One night I was tooling along at 3.5 mph at one end and when I finished the round I was crawling at 2 mph. The soybeans had gone from 9.5% moisture to 12% moisture in just one round.

We unload the combine on the go, saving time. A great day is where I can start combining in the morning and not stop the combine or get out of the cab, except for calls of nature, until night. Combines cost so much money (a new combine and head will cost around $500,000) that you can't afford the down time. Also we want to get the crops out as fast as possible as soon as they are ready for harvest. Nothing good can happen to them in the field once they are ripe.

Climate controlled cabs are not a luxury during harvest. This a shot of the same grain cart the same day, just going the opposite direction. The wind was blowing all the dust from the back of the combine up to the front. Soybean dust is very scratchy and not good in the lungs.

Here are three of our trucks used to haul the crops away to market. We run a fleet of five trucks. One has already left for the elevator and one was busy hauling hogs (a sideline business). Only three of the five are my trucks. The others belong to a neighbor. We share the combine and harvest crew to reduce our costs. It has worked out well for both of us.

When soybeans harvest is finished, hopefully this week, we will move immediately to corn harvest. This will take longer because we have more corn acres to harvest. I will post again then.

Recap of 2011

At the start of 2012, it is time to look back on 2011. What went right, and what needs changing. All in all 2011 was a good year for us at Batie Cattle. Co. The bottom line showed a profit so count that as a win.

First the good...
The corn and soybean planting went well, once we started. It was too wet at first and we had to waaaait. And I an not good at waiting. The herbicides we applied as a burndown earlier in the spring to kill any winter annuals worked very well, the fields were clean. Crop emergence was great and the stands were very regular.

We were able to cultivate in a timely fashion, although we did have a few bearings go out on the cultivators. Post emergent herbicides went on when they were supposed to and also did a great job. We had very few weed skips this year. This was the second year to use our GPS system with our sprayer to turn the sprayer on and off and regulate the amount of spray being applied. Much better than doing it manually.

Ridging the corn was a little exciting this year, as it always seems to be. Some wet weather and warm temperatures got the corn shooting up. We had to hurry across the fields, but we got them all done this year. The last two years we had to leave some fields because the corn was too tall.

Then the bad...
We had a couple of hailstorms this summer. Both came fairly early and didn't cause much yield loss across the board, but a couple of fields were hammered. The crop insurance adjuster rated our fields at 5-20% hail loss, but told us it would be worse at harvest on a couple. He was right. The stalks were bruised by the hailstones and fell over before the combine could get there.

And then the ugly!!!
July 6 we had a very strong wind storm come through and break a lot of corn off. We call this greensnap and the broken corn plants are now dead. It can happen if we get a high wind when corn is rapidly elongating, or growing taller. This was a bad year. It is also hybrid dependent. Some are tougher than others, although all will break some. This year we had one hybrid have 50-70% greensnap. Even out best hybrids had 10-15% greensnap. This really showed up at harvest.

Given these issues it is not surprising that our yields were about 40 bushels per acre below our long term average. I didn't even have enough corn to fill all the contracts with the elevator. Luckily the prices were high this year and we still made a profit on the corn.

Soybeans, on the other hand were excellent this year. They were not bothered by the high wind and the hail did not hurt them at all. Yields were great, around 70 bushels per acre. Alfalfa was also great. We had very little rain issues getting the alfalfa baled and the tonnage was high. Prices for both of these crops were very high and profits were large.

What was new this year? We installed subsurface drip irrigation (SDI) on 80 acres this spring. This is a very new and fairly expensive type of irrigation in Nebraska. We installed it because this field is not conducive to a pivot and is fairly steep on the upper side. Gravity irrigation was not very efficient. After one year I am satisfied, but we had some bugs to be worked out. I think 2012 will go better.

We installed row clutches on our planter tied to our GPS system. This turns the rows on and off. The advantage comes on fields that have a slanted end and we used to double plant a lot of the ground, wasting seed. This worked great.

At harvest the soybean flex head tore itself up and we got to demo a draper head. It didn't get to leave. We bought it. What a wonderfully designed piece of equipment.

So what is on the horizon for 2012. After harvest we purchased and installed two center pivot irrigation systems. These will be my first two "circles." I have always been a gravity irrigator. We have also agreed to purchase a tile plow. We will use this tool to bury drain tile on some of our wet ground. The ground water table has been rising and hurting yields on several fields. We hope this will give us better growing conditions. There is very little tiled ground in central Nebraska, but a lot of interest. We hope to install several miles of tile this spring and a lot more this fall.

Crop prices look good for 2012, but not yet great. Cash rents went up this year. I had to renew several term leases this year. Fertilizer and chemicals also went up. I think everyone wants a piece of the higher grain prices. The cash flow for the bank looks pretty good.

I am starting to get very nervous for the future. I have seen booms and busts before. It wouldn't take much to knock corn back to $3.00 or lower and soybeans back to $7.00. I have protected all of 2012's crop with puts or contracts. Who knows about 2013.

Harvest

So much for keeping up with this blog. Now we are into harvest. I totally skipped writing about irrigation this year. Will try to do better next year.

We are rained out of harvest now, so I will try to get started on this again. This last weekend we received 2.75-3.25 inches of rain. It is very muddy everywhere now. We hope to get started again Wednesday, but today is foggy and cool, not what we needed. We will be loading trucks on the road for the next week or so, this is lots of fun for both the harvest crews and anyone who is traveling the country roads.

We did start harvest on high moisture corn last Monday, 10/3/11. This was delivered to a cattle feedlot to be ground and packed into a bunker silo for storage. High moisture corn is a great feed for cattle in a feedlot and it allows harvest to start sooner. They want corn with a moisture content of 25-30%, much wetter than dry corn which is stored at 13-15% moisture. The wet corn is ground and packed tight to get as much air out as possible. The pile is covered with plastic and will ferment (like beer) and will keep for the next year.

We have one day of wet corn to go before we can start on soybeans. The soybeans were also ready last week, but wet corn has a higher priority. It is tough to time the wet corn harvest since in normal weather corn can dry out 1-2% of moisture a day. So corn that is 30% today will be 25% in 3 days normally. This year it went from 26% to 22% in one day.

Yields of our wet corn is about what was expected. No record yields this year. We had some hail damage early,  ranging from 5-15% loss, and some greensnap, ranging from 10-50% broken. Greensnap is a nasty loss. It happens when we get a very strong wind at exactly the wrong time. Corn can be very brittle just before the tassel comes out if it has been growing rapidly, which it did this year. Then we got 70-90 mph winds one night. Snap. One hybrid had greensnap of 50%, others were 10-15%. It really hurts the yields, and there is not much you can do. While some hybrids are tougher than others, all could greensnap if they get wind at the wrong day.

We are exited to get into the soybeans. We have been hearing yields that are way above record yields from our neighbors. I hope ours are there as well.

Let the sun shine.