Week ending August 25th...

Harvest is now fully underway in our area.  We are nearing 25% completion with our corn harvest.  Moisture's have been as low as 17% and as high as 22% on the acres we have harvested.  We have other fields that are much higher in moisture and will wait on those to dry further before we combine them.  Yesterday's 90 plus degree temperatures and 25 mph winds blasted the corn and surely removed two entire points of moisture.  It also snapped the tops out of the really dead corn and made them look worse than they really are.  Our yields have been all over from poor to better than expected.  Our continuous corn acres are hanging in there and we cannot say there is a penalty.  That being said, the big differences are hybrid and planting date from what we have seen.  We have harvested a couple Poncho/Votivo 500 seed treatment trials and so far the PV500 is 2-6 bpa better which certainly pays for the added expense with these commodity prices.  We also had a Urea vs. ESN trial and measured virtually no difference. 

We continue to carve out our remaining fields at a rapid pace.  Rumors of aflotoxin in corn have been around, but we have not seen any in our fields yet. 

Be safe and please be patient with all farmers this fall as we move our farm equipment along on the back roads and highways. 

Harvesting corn on the Stelte field just East of Ashland along Rt. 125 

Max & Owen waiting for their first combine ride of the season 

Unloading into a wagon

Harvest begins...

With corn planted the end of March and hot temperatures to bring it to maturity quickly, we began our 2012 harvest this afternoon.  The corn pictured below is Wyffels 7997 (114 day VT3 Pro) sprayed with fungicide.  Moistures bounced between 19-22%.  We had planned to begin harvest next Monday, but with the forecast calling for "severe" storms and chances of high winds, we decided it was time to start harvesting.  There are only a few neighbors running, but next week most all will get started.  We are still dry, which means we will continue to welcome showers if they keep us out of the fields.  We have never started harvest this early...

Week ending August 4th...

Not much action to report since my last entry.  A few neighbors have started corn harvest, but many will wait until the 13th or even the 20th.  Initial yield reports have been poor to very poor and grain moisture's have been all over the place.  We have received a little rain since last week which will help the soybeans although more will be needed to bring them along to normal maturity and yield.

The picture below is of a corn plant our neighbor has in his driveway.  It was just a kernel that found a crack and planted itself.  And it's planted in gravel no less.  I'm not sure if they have been watering it or not, but it has NINE ears on it!  That is hard to believe, but the yield potential of a corn plant is really impressive when the right conditions exist.