Harvest has come and gone...

What a whirlwind harvest season we experienced! We started about week later than normal, but finished a week ahead. Practically "ideal" weather allowed us to harvest unimpeded from start to finish with just two afternoon rain outs where we could send everyone home for a weekend. And by the end of harvest we were asking for rain to replenish the soils as the ground was hard and void of moisture. All in all, it was our best soybean harvest ever and our 2nd best corn harvest behind the 2022 crop year. We currently have all the fall tillage prep work completed and are within 400 or so acres of having all our intended fall anhydrous ammonia acres applied. While it's currently super cold and the ground is starting to freeze, we surely will get another opportunity to do some fieldwork this winter. The team in the shop is busy doing maintenance to equipment and getting things repaired and put away from harvest so it's ready to go for next season. We are also starting to haul out our December corn sales to nearby Bartlett Grain in South Jacksonville. This week we will focus our efforts on delivering our first installment of nonGMO soybeans to CG&B in Naples, IL. These will be loaded on barges and floated down the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers where they will be loaded on Panamex vessels and shipped to Japan. We have a narrow window of delivery each period so it will be all hands on deck to get this task completed this week. Office work such as planning for next year's crops as well as end of year reporting and tax planning are also top of mind. Next year's crop will go in the ground in a short four months and in fact we have our first load of seed being delivered this month to plant in 2025. Thank you to all our fulltime and seasonal employees for another great harvest and fall season as well as all our family members who pitch in and tolerate all the hours away from home we cram into two months. We hope each of you reading this had a wonderful Thanksgiving spent with family and friends and are looking forward to slowing down a bit for the Christmas Holiday season. 

Harvesting soybeans on the Lehman farm South of Pleasant Plains.

The new Case AF10 combine on our farm this fall with it's 50' draper head for soybeans. Quite a step up from the Class 9 and 8 machines we operate.

Applying dry fertilizer for next year's crops.

The new Case AF10 combine - pictured here with it's 18 row corn head.

A beautiful harvest sunset as we dump at our main grain facility.

Harvesting corn on our Greenfield farms.

Another truckload of corn headed out. Our grain cart can hold two semi loads at one time. 

Small little tile project to drain seven acres of wet end rows beside the road out of an 80 acre field.

Applying Anhydrous Ammonia nitrogen to feed next year's corn crop. This field was corn this year and will be corn again next year.