Tuesday, October 28, 2025
The guys are concentrating on clean-up today. Even though it is a gloomy, gray, and sometime drizzly day, they work diligently to remove harvest-time’s grime from the machines. The combines especially are dirty… the corn fields turned them a dreary shade of black.
John has been working on washing the GSI 2326 grain dryer for most of this day. It takes several hours of work with the garden hose to rinse it off, and wash away what falls from it.
John starts at the very top to wash down the grain dryer. This dryer was an upgrade we installed in 2012, seems crazy that it has now dried 14 corn crops!
Finished up high, John washes down the bottom section of the dryer
Brandon D and Brandon K are working on other equipment, using first the air compressor. It speeds the cleaning process to blow away the debris before using water to wash the machines, especially the combines and headers. After the air cleaning, the combines and headers come to the wash pad… outside if the weather is warm enough, but inside the shop (one at a time) if the weather is too chilly.
Corn head and combine will get the compressed air today.
Brandon D blows the loose debris from the RD40F header. The MacDon (L) gets this treatment, too.
C12F Corn head too!
A good scrubbing with #Andyclean soap and water will happen, too!
I was out this morning with the JD 6145R tractor and R15 rotary cutter to mow along the roadside at the Pond farm, and then I went to Wheatland to mow ditch banks along the Steen and Newman farms. Yes, it was a little damp, but it cut pretty well anyway. It felt good to get that mowing done. I returned to the main farm and washed the R15 cutter. It is now stored away for the winter. The 6145R tractor has a hydraulic leak somewhere under the cab, and we have it in the shop to diagnose and fix it. The Demco 1322 grain cart was washed on Saturday by Brandon D, and it was tucked away into storage today.
Check out this video of how a rotary cutter works.
Clean and ready for winter
Shined up and stored. It needs a little repair on the bottom auger, and we will get to that on a cold day this winter.
There are two important parts to the post-harvest clean-up. First, the machines and trucks simply must appear like new. Sometimes it takes us some weeks to get the clean-up done, as other tasks may intrude on the process. But, eventually, every truck, trailer, tractor and machine will be made to shine! Second, the cleaned machines simply must be stored under roof. It is important for us to have everything stored inside, or at least under roof, and out of the sun and/or rain. The sun is a primary enemy to shiny paint. Our new 2024-built building certainly helps us achieve the goal to have every machine under roof. Only one machine is now stored off-site, in a building at the Huey farm.
The week’s weather prediction calls for rain tonight and tomorrow. Probably won’t be much cleaning progress done in tomorrow’s rain. Instead, I hope we can get the JD 6145R leak stopped!
There are a limited number of fields that are being soil sampled this fall to determine the fertility plan for 2026. We have a system to test each field once every 3 years, using a grid-sampling method, every 5 acres. By returning each 3rd year to the same spots, we can evaluate how the soil’s fertility changes and improves over time. This year, as they pull the soil samples, they are also creating a new digital boundary for each field. I will try my best to import these accurate boundaries into our Operations Center system…these boundaries will be an improvement over our old, manually-created digital boundaries.
John went yesterday to the Lett and Watjen farms with the JD 9R540 tractor and JD 2660VT to run the 43-foot-wide vertical tillage machine over the DCB acres there. This machine lightly works the soil and performs better at higher field speeds (8mph minimum, that’s really fast for me!) Nutrien had already applied the 2026 corn fertilizer on those 5 fields, and his work incorporated the fertility into the soil. It also incorporates the wheat/soybean crop residue into the soil, which permits the soil to dry and warm up faster next spring. Without the work of the VT tool, the crop residue is a thick mulch, under which the soil stays wet for a long, long time next spring. The Crook farm got this VT pass on Saturday, and the Home farm will get it as soon as Nutrien gets the 2026 corn fertility applied (and weather permits).
Most of the 2026 corn and soybean fertilizers have already been applied by Nutrien. We are waiting for the final soil test results on the Home farm before this final place will be applied. We are well on our way for #plant26 already!
The chilly, gray, and damp days this week surely drive home our gratitude that our harvest was finished on Friday evening. Happy to be done.
