Harvest progress hit and miss

Nathan Birkemeier

We have not started with harvest yet. Everything is really close. I’m thinking this weekend or early next week we’ll be able to get in the field. Everything is looking really good. We’ve had a couple days of frost. It definitely is going to help some of the leaves drop that are still kind of hanging on there by a thread, but for the most part the leaves all are down.

The frost definitely held off long enough to where everything matured to the point where the frost isn’t going to hurt us. We do have some double-crop beans and we always hope for a couple more growing days for those. I would guess they are somewhere in the 20-bushel range. I’m happy with the way they look. They’re really green and they had plenty of moisture, so hopefully we just filled as many pods as we could before the frost.

In our area there’s a lot of people that are hitting it pretty hard. A couple bigger farms have a couple hundred acres off already and they are really going to town in the fields that are fit. They got crops out earlier in the spring and they’re ready to go.

I think the yields so far around here are average to above average. There are obviously some pockets in the fields where they’re doing better than guys thought they were, but I don’t know if this is going to be the year to hit that record yield.

We like to wait a day or two after everything is ready so we can go in and cut the whole field and then just keep moving and keep sawing acres off. We like to jump into a field and just keep going.

 Everything is standing really well. The tallest beans around us are maybe waist high. The corn is standing really good and we haven’t had any really bad wind yet.

Joe Everett

 We’re shelling corn today and we’re going to start getting into another field. We’re pleasantly surprised with how dry the corn has been. We’ve been showing anywhere from 20% to 24% moisture. It is surprising, but we just started in a later variety and it was 20%, so I’m going to guess maybe it had a little bit of disease or something coming on late in the season that affected the health of the plant and caused that moisture to drop. I know we were all pretty excited when we started seeing dry corn this early.

We are pretty happy with yields. They have been a little better than we thought. The weather was a little different this year with the rains but, all in all, we’re pretty happy with both our corn and our beans. 

I think we’re a little ahead with harvest for this area. There are not too many people running and I think it’s just because the beans are really tough and green right now. That’s one thing we like doing — we plant a little bit earlier varieties on beans. That way we can actually get out and get started and that’s really helped us get a faster start. Then with this corn being a little bit drier than we anticipated, we got out there to start shelling and get our dryer running and everything going smoothly. We had a few little wiring issues with our dryer but not nothing major. We got things fixed and got everything back online. So far so good, knock on wood.

My uncle runs the combine and my cousin runs the cart. Me and my dad take care of hauling the grain and making sure everything is running smoothly with the dryer and the grain leg.

Kurt Wyler

Our county fair is just winding up so we weren’t able to be in the fields a whole lot yet. The fair was a little cooler than usual and it was definitely a lot easier on the livestock.

Yesterday we were able to finally get in the field and start running some beans. We were running on some of our ground pretty close to our home farm, so it does get a little more manure and it is fertile hill ground. We were very happy with how it was running. They were under 12% moisture and 65 to 75 bushels to the acre. I think it’s going to be pretty hard to hold that average across all of our acres, but if we can it sure would be nice.

Luckily the beans were in good shape. It’s always a real bad day if the beans are a little tough and you’re trying to get everything fine-tuned and nothing is going right. We did have some little things here with the combines and I think we’ve got most everything worked out, but every day is a new adventure. You never know exactly what’s going to happen or what’s going to break. 

A lot of the beans in the area are probably still a week or two out. Our plan is to hopefully find enough dry beans to get both combines rolling this weekend and try to knock out as many acres as we can before the elevator lines get too long.

A few people have run a little bit of corn, but the majority of the corn in this area is still pretty green. We’re going to try to focus on getting as many beans off as we can before switching to corn before days get shorter and the weather gets worse.

The majority of all of our crops are far enough along that the frost did not really affect them much. There are some double-crop beans in the area that definitely will be affected. 

We’re hoping to get our wheat in here as quickly as possible, which is why we’re trying to get a few of these beans taken off a little bit earlier. We’d like to like to get that wheat in and get it started here before it does get too cold on us. The way the rotation has fallen, we’re going to have a little bit more wheat than usual. I think there might be a few more guys putting out wheat this year with prices the way they are.

Ryan Hiser

There are a lot of guys that are starting to really get into the fields and they are seeing some decent crops, but we have not started and there is still quite a bit of green out there. I was just around Washington Court House earlier today and I noticed a couple fields that were a pretty dark shade of green, which is not good for this time of year.

I have also seen combines cutting beans and shelling corn today. I’ve heard anywhere from the low to mid 20s and a couple of high teens in terms of moisture content. It seems it’s going to be sporadic. It’s not going to be just like a single moisture number out there. 

We’re going to go through and double-check these combines out make sure they’re good to go. We’re still waiting on some of these seed beans to dry down and we want to run them first. That way we don’t have to clean the combine out again. 

It turned off dry the last couple of weeks here and ground is showing some cracks and starting to become a little bit hard. Some guys doing fall tillage might be holding off on that even though they might have down time while they’re waiting on crops dry out.

The frost came sooner than we wanted, but at the same time I think there’s a decent amount of the crop out here that hit maturity. We’re at it or towards the end of this life cycle. I think some of these double-crops have benefited from these longer, drier days and they have been able to fill out some pods. 

There are some guys that are way further ahead. A lot of them are the bigger guys who have to go, but at the same time they have stuff that actually is ready because they’re more spread out and they were able to get those crops in earlier.