We began our corn harvesting yesterday.  Usually on the first day, you discover some bugs in our system, and we did find a few.  There was a grain leak in the old elevator that was undiscovered until yesterday, and Montgomery Welding is here this morning to fix that.

The corn has more moisture than we anticipated, averaging about 27%.  We’d prefer that to be 25% or less, and ideally it would be 22% or less.  Looks like the ‘solar dryer’ needs to work for a few days more.  We have no soybeans ready to cut, they’re just not ripe yet.  So, we will ease into the corn, at a ‘yellow light’ pace, not a ‘green light’ pace.  The way the corn has dried down is not consistent or uniform.  The hillside areas are drier but with lower yields, and the flatter or lower field areas have wetter corn (but the yields are higher).  Ross and John are working with our GSI dryer, and it is operating pretty well; it just seems slow because of the high amount of water it has to burn out of the grain.

The bright spot in all this is the average corn yield.  Even though the past 6-8 weeks have been dry and hot, the yield numbers are above expectations!  You cannot know all the results from just one small day of harvest, but the trend is a good one, and we’re grateful.