|
Welcome! "Failing to prepare is preparing to fail." John Wooten, famous UCLA basketball coach
I guess I'll leave this on the front page for a time, then it will go to the 2008 season as it was 2008 crop. 2009-02-18 We are picking corn in SD. It's actually going all right, and the moisture has come down quite a bit since late fall. 2008-12-13 With another impending snow storm we've finished up our main corn and sunflowers in SD and they are trying to get home before the roads get bad. There is another 1000 ac. of corn we could harvest now, but it will have to wait to see what the weather does. It is still on the wet side, and there really is no place to go with it. |
there had 1000 acres of corn still at 20+% moisture at the end of the normal fall harvest and didn't want the drying expense. We were hoping to pick it soon after Christmas but it was too snowed in then. Luckily, the beginning of February they got some real warm days that settled the snow enough before turning back pretty cold, which was important as it is "no-till" and we didn't want to harm the ground in any way. There were still a few snow drifts at the edges of the field but not too bad. The best part of all is it got picked with out wrecking anything, ran 130 bu. or so with really no visible loss, and the moisture was down to about 16%! When it was all said and done and had gone well we were glad to be able to help this farmer out, even though it was dreaded all winter. He really did his part too, to
make it all go smoothly in many ways, including staying in the field one night and starting stuff that had been starting hard by morning every few hours to make sure it would start right off when it was time to run, and making a trip with equipment home to our yard with our guys. Although the combines had already come out of there as they were 
traded off, it was kinda nice our 2008 100th combine was available to go back out to really FINISH it. Our thanks to the guys that came to go out and brave below 0 F. windchills to get this done too. If guys start fussing about heat and being hot during wheat harvest I always told them just wait, as they would be cold before it was all over with, but this was pretty extreme! There was a a spell of near blizzard conditions they were able to pick right through as the humidity and temperature was just right it didn't cause a problem other than very poor visibility.
It won't seem right to have it here with 2009 when we head in to wheat, would it? Rob and a couple guys have been working in the shop, and the main crew starts to arrive in April. As of now pretty much the whole winter wheat belt is suffering from very dry conditions. 
| Litchfield, MN USA |