Saturday, September 28, 2013

In the picture below, you can see what replanting looks like now.  In the foreground, you can see the ‘brown’ beans that we are currently cutting.   Then, looking carefully, you can see an area of faint ‘gray’ color; those were the first replanting.  Then it’s easy to spot the dark green strips that were replanted in July. We must ‘cut around’ both the gray and the green now in order to harvest the soybeans that are ready.  We will return to this farm (and many others) in November to harvest the ones we leave behind today.  It makes harvesting a bit more tedious…you can’t just start at one side of the field and cut your way across to the other.  You have to maneuver around these irregularly-shaped patches.  The one bright spot about the replanting:  There will likely be some soybeans to harvest in those patches.  If no replanting had been done, those patches would yield zero.  The phrase ‘better late than never’ applies here, too.

Working at the Freddie farm on Friday afternoon. We work around replanted areas. Of the 310 acres here, we will get about 200 now, and return when the others are ripe.  Also in the picture is the JD 9360R tractor with the Unverferth 1110 grain cart.  The gray and brown are different varieties of beans.  The green ones will also be gray when ripe for harvest.

Compared to the yields we’ve seen so far in the corn, the soybeans have not been as impressive as the corn.  They will likely end up a bit lower in yield than our expectation.  We have seen good yield numbers, but the dry July-August period combined with the too-wet May-June is holding them back a bit.

Barring any breakdown, we should finish at the Freddie farm today, and move on to another location.  Rain is predicted for tonight and tomorrow.  That would cause us to revert back to corn harvest for a day or two beginning Monday.  That could be a good thing, for that would allow us to ‘uncover’ the remaining acres for wheat planting.