Monday, October 12, 2015

The corn is all done and brought in from the fields.  We rolled over the last of the Shake farm in the early afternoon on Saturday.  Thursday night, we cut the final regular soybeans at Nellie.  So, now the tasks move on to the great clean-up.  This should go faster and easier than many years (especially 2014) because there was no muddy fields during harvesting!

Last Monday morning, we harvested corn, but switched to soybeans in the afternoon.  The weather allowed us to stick with the soybeans through Thursday night, when those were finished.  Friday and Saturday, we harvested corn, and finished that off, too.  To understand our harvest priority, if you have soybeans and corn ready at the same time, you cut the beans first.  Soybeans require a dry day to harvest.  In corn, you can harvest it on a less-than-perfect fall day.  So, soybeans come first for us!

We had another visitor on Thursday afternoon.  Geoff Johnson, a professional photographer whom we met during the harvest of 2013, returned Thursday late afternoon to capture some images of the soybean harvest.  Geoff is a Nebraska native, but had driven to our location from Chicago that day!  It was good to see Geoff again.

Some scenes from this wonderful weather week.

Looking north from the back part of the main farm, on a good corn harvest day.

Loading a truck!

Working in the soybean field at Freddie on Wednesday afternoon. Guest Damien is driving.

Damien is all smiles as we pause a bit on the final day of soybean harvest, Thursday.

Brandon loads soybeans into the old Red Stripe Mack truck. This was at the Freddie farm.

Bill and Brandon serviced the S680 on Friday morning, fueling it up and making the external and internal adjustments needed to switch back from harvesting soybeans to corn.

Friday morning, you could begin to see the cover crop wheat beginning to peek out of the soil. A good sight!  This was planted by Larry with the MX290 and the JD 1560 drill early last week.

Friday noon, we said our goodbyes to Damien at the Evansville airport. What a sweet time we had together.

A ‘team picture’, taken by Rhoda to show the folks that helped bring in the harvest. L to R: Ross, Brandon, Bill, Larry, Dennis, John and French guest Damien

It was a wonderful harvest season, 4 weeks start to finish.  This was one of our shorter times to gather in our crops.  The weather was so very nice, there was only two short rain delays, and the fields were dry enough to support the travel of the trucks.  Having the trucks close by in the field also speeds up the process!  We are certainly grateful for such helpful weather.  The team worked together well to make each day productive.

Yes, we did experience the diminished yields from the effects of the flooding of June and July.  But we did enter every field, and bring home some grain from each one.  Yields are down in 2015 from our experience of the past few years, but we could see this coming.  Our August drone pictures adjusted our expectations!  Even so, we are grateful.  Our storage bins are filled, and we hope for some improvement in commodity prices over the winter.

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*just one caveat about harvest being finished.  Yes, there remains to cut about 20 acres of really late-planted soybeans.  Those were planted on July 17, and today they are green.  We expect those to be ripe in mid- to late-November.  So, technically, we’re not ‘done’ with harvest, but substantially so.  The clean-up of one combine and the grain cart and the trucks will begin now.  We’ll leave the S680 as is until those late beans are in the bin.