Combines are rolling, but harvest still a bit behind schedule

Lawrence Onweller

Most guys have gotten started by now or are just getting started. The moisture of the corn varies by the maturity or when you planted, like it always does. I’ve been hearing all sorts of different moisture levels coming out of the fields. It’s the same thing with the beans.  

It’s been dry. Even though we’ve been getting intermittent showers, they haven’t amounted to a whole lot. I think we’ve had three in the last week. The rain has been just enough to slow down harvest. When the corn fodder is wet it makes it harder to get that the corn through the combine.

The wheat fields planted in September look really nice. I have not heard of anybody really cutting back on wheat yet around here.

Corn yields around here have been from 220 bushels down to 190 bushels. The one field run on our farm is running around 190, which would be right at its APH. The beans are right at APH or maybe a little better.

We plant more full season corn and it was somewhere around 27% to 29%, which is really too high. We’re just taking some out to get everything working, so not a lot of progress yet. One field is out because they were early beans, but the rest of the beans are 3.4s and they’re getting close. They are seed beans for Pioneer, so you have to take extra care when taking them out. There are still some green stems out there. It is really hard to do a good job if you’ve got a lot of green stems and get the quality of beans you want.

There’s a lot of disease. Tar spot came in late so we don’t think it really did much damage. People who used fungicide have been happy with the results. It just seems like it pays every year. 

We got those July and August rains so corn and bean yields should be good. People around here will know a little better by the end of the week how yields are looking.

Jeff Magyar

Some farmers have started harvesting beans. We’ve done about 200 acres. We received at the elevator probably 30,000 to 40,000 bushels from four or five different farmers who have started on beans.

We’ve run our poorest beans. They were right around 40 bushels. I was just concerned they might have been lower than that. So far, the bean size is very small this year from either not enough water or they died early from disease. The food grades are usually a very big-seeded bean, but they are smaller than normal. Yields were as low as 20 up to 65. On a swale or somewhere in heavier ground that has more moisture they definitely had a better yield.

Some guys in the area sprayed some beans to get them off sooner to get wheat in behind them.

I have not heard about corn coming off for grain yet, just chopping for the dairies. I was talking to a dairy farmer up north and he was he was happy with the tonnage and yield. It was better than he was anticipating, but this is 15 miles north where they had more rain.

I have never run beans with the ground as dry and hard as it was. The dust was the worst I’ve ever seen at the reel because the plants had no rain on them. We got an inch and half of rain in the last two days. Before that we hadn’t had really had a rain here in 2 or 3 weeks. From now on we’ll probably struggle with wetter soils and keeping the cutter bar out of the mud.

The beans coming into the elevator were 13% to 17%. None of the beans were really ready. Now, once they lose this moisture, they’ll be ready when they dry out. 

Doug Miller

On Sept. 25 we shelled approximately 30 acres of corn because we didn’t have any beans quite ready yet. It was 22% to 24% moisture and yield was excellent. We thought we’d be able to shell corn all that week because of what we found in the first 30 acres. We finished that field and the next day we went to another field we got into 28% to 32% moisture, so we pretty much parked the machine and did other odds and ends until late in the week. That next Sunday, Oct. 1 we started cutting beans, and there again the yields were very strong. After a day or two, the beans really got dry at 9%, 10% or 11% until we got rain on Thursday afternoon. About that same time we had a breakdown, so we got that fixed. We got back into the beans this past Saturday and yields were still strong and the moisture was back up to 12% or 13%, which is what we like to see. The draper head is a lot more forgiving than the old conventional grain head and I think that we had some shattering when the beans were very dry, but it was greatly reduced.

In the beans we had some 80s and 90s show up on the yield monitor. For averages, the low has been 71 and the high has been 76, so we’re right in there in the low to mid 70s so far. With the rain we had in August, we had so much vegetative growth and I think that took away from actual seed production. 

The one corn field we did across the scales was 240-plus. We may see a personal best for the Miller farm this year on the corn. 

We are planning to get some wheat in. We’re about a day from running our beans where we want to plant the wheat. I’m sure the beans are dry, but the stems are still green. We were going to start on those yesterday and went to another field that didn’t have as many green stems. Hopefully by this time next week we’ll have wheat in the ground. 

We are extremely dry. We’ve heard of a couple combine fires in the area. That’s another reason we’re not in a big hurry get the wheat in the ground as of yet — the ground is so dry. If we get some moisture it would plant a lot easier for the wheat.

Kyle Nietfeld

We took off a third of the bean acres and have really good beans. We did a few acres of corn and there’s nothing to complain about there either.

 The beans have all been over 60 bushels so far and the corn has been hanging around the 200-bushel mark in this area, so we’re really fortunate. We talked to some neighbors who got into some areas with white mold in the beans. They’re still having good decent yields, but the monitor will get up around 80 and then it’ll be down to 20 in spots where they get in the white mold.

The hillsides are yielding a lot less than what the good, dark ground is for the corn, but we haven’t done a whole lot of corn. Even the hillsides, though, seem to be doing better than average. We shelled some 100-day corn planted May 10 or 11 and it was still actually testing 22%. It was a little bit wetter than we really were hoping for. We tried some full season corn and it was 24% or 25% yet, so we could still use some good drying days. Hopefully the yield is there to make up for the for the gas that we’re going to be burning. 

Last week, we received anywhere from an inch to 4 inches and the 4 inches came almost in one hour. it really dumped. The fields are still carrying, but they’re a little on the softer side. We were so dry going into it, a lot of it did soak up. Fields are getting to the time of year when they don’t dry out as fast as they used to. I planted some grass putting in yard, and I think half my grass seed ended up in the ditch it rained so hard.

There is good chance of rain coming Wednesday night or Thursday so we’d like to get some wheat planted. We’re going to skip a couple bean fields and go to a further farm because it’s going to wheat and then work our way back towards Fort Recovery.

The rain may have helped the double-crop beans a little. There’s some of them that are starting to yellow up, so it probably did not help much.