Tuesday night, October 8, 2019

We “caught the dryer” about 8pm today.  So, we stopped the combines in the cornfield.  We had been working most of the day at the Burke farm, the location we purchased in late 2012.    We were pretty pleased with the results there, one of the better locations for corn in this challenging year.  We are nearing the end of having May-planted corn.  Looks like we may have to pause harvest to allow the remainder of the corn and soybeans to get dry enough for harvesting.  That will be a hard thing, especially if the weather is nice, to watch a beautiful fall day go by without being in the combine.  But, we will check the remaining fields again Wednesday morning to prioritize the timing of harvest of each one.   We have about 2 more days of May corn, and then we will be scurrying around to find a field with harvest-able corn or soybeans!.

Harvesting of soybeans typically ranks as a higher priority than corn, if the weather is nice.

But if the weather is less than ideal, or we ‘run out’ of dry soybeans, we go back to the corn field.

There have been some challenges with our grain cart.  We have experienced some frequent failures with the tracks.  The ‘cart part’ has been great, but the undercarriage and tracks have been broken down frequently.  We thought we had performed diligent preventive maintenance, but still the breakdowns have hit.  We finally brought in a different cart, as we wait days for the proper repair parts to arrive.   It has brought some frustration.  But with the substitute cart, we are moving ahead with harvest, albeit a bit more slowly with a smaller capacity cart.

So, we adjust to the conditions as they occur here at Carnahan & Sons.   The fall so far has been quite nice for harvest conditions.  The wheat crop is planted, and good progress is being made on those soybean and corn fields.  We are grateful for our crop results… the corn yield is down some percentage points from an average year, but the soybeans we have harvested so far are above average.   We would expect yields to fall a bit as we move into the June-planted corn and the DCB and later-planted soybeans.  We are now a bit over half-way done with #harvest19.  Soon, the preparations for #plant20 will begin.  In fact, some fertilizers have been spread already for some 2020 corn!

Nutrien places some P, K, and micronutrients down for 2020 corn 

It has been interesting.   1 Thessalonians 5:16-18