Yesterday was a rainy day in southern Indiana.  It was a welcome sight after so many weeks of dry weather.  We received 2.1 inches of rain from Saturday night until this morning.  We are convinced that it will help the yield of the double-crop soybeans.  My friend Sylvan Ice and I agreed at church last evening that this rain was sufficient; it could stop now until November!   But we also know we are not in charge of such things… and whatever our Maker sends will be OK with us.

I expect the trucks to be busy today delivering corn to market…I would not expect to return to the fields to harvest until Wednesday.

Hopefully, we will have some soybeans to cut on the next day the conditions are favorable.   Harvesting soybeans is my personal favorite thing to do.  It’s always a pretty good day, usually sunny, with dry conditions.  And these days, with improved herbicide technology, the soybeans are typically weed-free.  Quite a contrast to my younger days, when soybean harvest was not anyone’s favorite task; the weeds often obscured the view of the soybeans.  Those big old weeds were hard for any combine to digest, and I think grassy weeds like foxtail were the worst.  They had a tendency to wrap around a ‘beater’ behind the thresing cylinder, sometimes causing it to stop.  The only way to clear away that kind of plug-up was to crawl in the back, and cut it loose with your pocketknife.  It was dirty, dusty, and you had to lie on straw-walkers… just picture rows of hundreds of inch-long pointy swords sticking up to greet you.  I’ve often said I don’t really miss the ‘good old days’ but that I appreciate the ‘good new days’.   In today’s rotary-design threshing systems, the straw walkers don’t exist!