Sunday, September 29th...

Harvest is underway on our farm.  Corn yields have been surprisingly good for as little rainfall as we received this summer.  We are focusing on our April 30 - May 2nd corn plantings as those fields have lower moisture content.  The bushels from those fields we are drying down in our grain dryer.  We are thankful to get started and very blessed to have good yields.  The corn we have harvested we have dried down and then hauled out to railroad elevator locations to our South in Waverly.  We sold quite a few bushels for a September delivery premium and as of today only have one more load to get delivered to satisfy our contracts.  Saturday afternoon, we missed the rains that came through, so we switched the combine over to soybeans and cut about 25 acres that tested 12.8%.  Yields from the soybeans were also surprising.  Fall is officially here!

Harvesting the end rows on our 1st field - harvest 2013

A view looking down from our wet bin at the dryer

Ron Brown and Phil Smith working on a roof for the grain cleaner

Taking our 1st load of Propane prior to harvest beginning

Sunday, September 15th...

More harvest preparations have occurred over the last two weeks.  We continue to prepare our grain drying facility with the final touches scheduled to be completed this week.  Last Thursday we fired up the combine and harvested the corn adjacent to our drying facility to make room for the grain pump and new circle drive way.  The corn's moisture tested 32.8% which is really wet so we only harvested half a truck load and stopped.  Our earlier planted corn is not drying as fast as we had hoped, but eventually we will need to get started as we have grain committed to be delivered by the end of the month.  We hope to start harvest in earnest on Monday the 23rd.  This allows us one more week to get all the machinery ready and wrap up any summer jobs we have managed to put off until now.  There is zero corn harvested in our immediate area as of this weekend.  

Harvesting corn to make more room around the grain dryer

An aerial view of our new dryer set up

Ron Brown's handy work installing concrete barriers to meet fire code on the bulk head of the large Lp tank

Fixing a tile hole on the Lehmann farm

Mowing downhill at a 30 degree angle on the County Line farm

Inter-planting clover in the CRP on our University of Illinois farm