This morning  at 5-something fall arrived.  I admit I slept through its coming.   It has ‘felt like’ fall for several days, cooler nights, foggy mornings.  We did receive some more rain yesterday, and it finally caused us to leave the corn field as darkness arrived.

Yesterday was one of those perplexing days for harvest.  We have as a priority the harvest of soybeans.  Once they are ‘ready’ (meaning the moisture content in the grain is 13% or less) we make every effort to harvest those first.  The difficulty comes in that the weather conditons must be dry for soybean harvest to occur.  So, not only do you have to have dry beans, the soil and weather conditions must be dry also.  Corn,on the other hand, can be harvested in less-than-perfect conditions.  In other words, after a rain, we will return to the corn field for harvest much sooner than we will go to the soybean field.  You can even harvest corn if there is some drizzle in the air, but not so for soybeans!  Therefore, we always use our best-fall-weather days in the soybean field.  The perplexing part of  yesterday was that on Wednesday night, we consulted the weather forecast, and decided that it would be a favorable day for soybean harvest.  We moved the combines home from the Dunn farm (about 2 miles) and changed them over for soybean harvest.  Then, when Thursday morning arrived, it was a nice sunny morning.  But about 830 am, the clouds rolled in, and the air felt clammy… not the proper conditions to harvest soybeans.  Even though rain was not predicted until evening, it just didn’t ‘feel right’.   So, we made the decision to return to the Dunn farm and continue with bringing in corn.  As it turned out, a correct decision for the day… at 11 am, there were sprinkles of rain that eliminated any doubt.   We were able to continue, finish at that location, and move to the Waldo farm for more corn.  We were able to harvest 60+ acres at Waldo, before the rain picked up and finally ended our harvest for the day.  The rainy night caused us to shut down our dryer, but it’s back up and running this morning.

This has been a busy machine this fall. See the steam rising above it? That indicates a cool morning.

I’m going to rely on Philip to prepare a video of us picking corn and cutting soybeans.  He did the one in August about disking.  His iPad is a great tool for that, and we anticipate that when we return to this Home farm for more corn, he will have to flexibility to step out of the grain cart or truck and take some video of Ross and me in our combines, as well as all the other operations that take place.

I hope we can also capture video our dear friend Larry Corn as he plants our wheat crop next week.  Larry started working for our dad as a 15-year old young man, over 40 years ago.  He takes his vacation every fall so that he can come to help us on the farm.   It has been his responsibility to plant the wheat crop for more years than I can remember.   If the weather allows, he will begin that on Monday the 26th.

So, this morning we will send more corn to market, and hope we can return to harvest corn this afternoon.

-Dennis