Dry weather helping harvest progress

Joe Everett

This weather has been great. I feel like the last couple of days have really helped with drying the corn down a little more. Hopefully today we’ll finish our beans and get back into corn.

Things are getting too dry. It is as dry as I’ve seen in a long time, but for us it’s really helped get our harvest done. It has been nice not fighting the weather conditions when getting the crop out.

Beans have been pretty good on moisture. A lot of them are running in the 9% range. They are dry but I’m not seeing much shattering. We don’t like to run them that dry but hate not to use the good weather to get them off. Overall, we’re pretty happy with the yield considering the year and just how wet we were after we got planted. These beans sat in water for a while. Yields have been all over the board depending on where we’re at, but it seemed like earlier beans were better. They were in the lower to mid 70s and everything else we ran has been in that mid-60 range. We’ll probably be in the upper 60s when we’re all said and done.
Corn surprisingly has been really good. We’re about half done with corn. It will be interesting to see as we move into our Champaign County ground and a little bit more into Miami County, just how much that changes. Right now, we’re anywhere from the 220 to 230 range. The dark ground got drowned this year and it seems like more of our high ground is really pulling those farms through on yield.

 So far everything’s going well. You always have little things here and there — a belt or something little with the dryer — but overall, everything’s been great. It seems like we’ve been in the field for a long time which, we have, but we’ve gotten so much done. Usually, we get a break here or there and now we’re just trying to push through at this point.

From here on, it is really going to depend on how dry the corn is. We haven’t gotten into some of our later planted corn. We got most of that late-April corn off and now we’re starting to get into our mid-May corn. It has been a few points wetter. It’s at 21%, so we haven’t been back into it for a few days. With the heat we’ve gotten, hopefully the moisture is a little lower. That’s going to determine how fast we get done with harvest.

Ryan Hiser

It’s been slow and steady, but we’ve been making some decent progress. We started off with corn. We shelled off about 75 acres or so and just got into some wetter stuff. About that time, we were able to start trying some of these seed beans. We got all the seed beans off as of yesterday and switched over to regular beans and we’re moving right along. 

It’s kind of crazy how wet some of this stuff still is. We’ve got some beans out here that are 3.8s and 3.7s that are still wet. We’ve got a 3.6 that’s really dried down so we’re going to make some progress today and then probably be slowed down again.

We spent two days making sure that the combine was completely cleaned out to have the seed beans uncontaminated. I think we did a good job of separating those. We weren’t even using semis, we were just using grain carts. Yields on seed beans are a little low but we knew they would be. 

We haven’t got into the best of our corn yet. The corn that we did do yielded as as good or better than I thought. I think it averaged out to be like 160 or 170, which is really good compared to what we thought it could be. In some of our better corn so far, I was hitting 200 easy in places and it’s averaging around 180, so we’re pretty enthusiastic about that. 

It’s getting really dry. We’re probably going to need some moisture here pretty soon. It sounds like we’re going to get some this week, but in terms of field conditions right now for us it’s helping out because we’re trying to get some of our wet areas harvested to make sure that we don’t have any field damage that we’d have to go back in and fix later.

Kurt Wyler

There have been a been a few rainy days, but we have had mainly nice weather here overall for harvest. Last week was maybe a little cooler than we would have liked, but last few days and this week looks like things are going to be warmer. 

We do have the majority of our wheat in that we plan to harvest as well as the wheat that we’re putting on as just a cover crop. It’s starting to come up and I’m sure with the warmer days, it should really take off. We have been getting a few rains here and there so I think there’s definitely enough moisture. 

We have been mainly focusing on running beans and we should be able to finish up today. The cooler, wet weather last week really did help us on some of our last beans that we had planted. They were still little tough but after that cold snap they were ready to roll. 

Overall, the bean yields have been very good. There were a few of our acres that may have gotten hurt just a little bit by the dry weather this summer, but it wasn’t anything horrible. I have not gone through to get a total average, but I would like to say that we’ll be somewhere around a 65-bushel average, so we’re definitely happy with that. 

The weather doesn’t look too bad for the rest of this week. We hope to start corn as soon as we finish up with these beans. There was a little bit of corn in our area that got planted pretty late. The frost definitely appears to have affected it. I’m not sure how that’s going to turn out. A lot of the corn is carrying a little bit of a little bit more moisture than usual. There’s definitely a lot of crops still standing and a lot of guys still have a long way to go.

Nathan Birkemeier

The weather’s been absolutely beautiful. We’re getting close to wrapping up our beans, hopefully by the end of this week. Then we’re excited to get into the corn. We’ve got some bean ground disked and we’re planting wheat. Everything is really going well.

We’re going to be all right with moisture for the wheat. We’re supposed to catch some rains the middle to the end of this week, so that’ll definitely get the wheat going. When we plant our wheat, we’re really looking to make sure that we’re in the moisture in case we do hit a dry spell. Our wheat won’t be the first out of the ground, but it will definitely get going.

Any place where beans didn’t get replanted did really well and the late season rains really helped put on the extra bushels on top. There is definitely a lot of variability, though. With anything that got replanted or took on a lot of water, we’re seeing as low as 45 bushels an acre, but in the good spots that got planted the first time around and really came up well, we’re seeing 65 to 70 in those areas. We’re really excited about those numbers.

The frost actually helped bring some of our beans around. That helped us speed things up and I would say in this area most of the guys are done with their beans. They’re starting on their corn or letting their corn sit a little bit to let the wind dry it out.

Corn moisture has been all over the board. There’s been stuff coming off at 17% that got planted right away and came up and then there’s some coming off at 25%. It really depends on where you’re at, when it got planted, the variety, and the maturity. There’s just a lot of variables. When it comes to corn, guys are really watching their dryers and keeping a close eye on them to make sure that that the dryer is able to fluctuate fast enough just to compensate for the variability and moisture.

I’m really hoping this weather sticks around at least the middle of November. That would be nice.