Is coming up soon!
Harvest on every farm can look different from the next. Farmers all grow different things and different seed types, which means those plants cam come at all different times during the harvest month. We plant various seed types that have different growing periods based on when we want the crop to be ready to harvest. For example, we plant an early seed variety because we chop corn silage and we need to get that done before we start harvesting our soybeans. Some farmers don’t chop corn silage, so often they start with soybeans and move on to corn. It isn’t common for us to even get to beans while we are chopping corn silage.
Corn silage is where we take the entire corn plant and chop it into tiny pieces. Check out this video I made a few years ago of our farm chopping corn silage.
https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/PJ7-YBzPWd4&source=uds
After corn silage it’s typically a draw between soybeans and wet corn. Most of the time it’s soybeans, but sometimes it’s wet corn. I don’t have a video of us combining soybeans, but here is a few pictures I have taken through the years so you can get the idea.Wet corn is something that is unique to a farmer that feeds the corn. Or has a big enough system to dry the corn as they combine. But, drying cost a whole lot of money. So, farmers that don’t feed cattle tend to try and wait for the corn to dry in the field as much as possible before combining. This is a video I made a few years ago of us combining wet corn. We combine the corn in the field with more water in it and then we pack it into a feed bunker and tarp it down to feed through the winter.
https://youtube.googleapis.com/v/3A4LQJNytUk&source=uds
Once we get through corn silage, soybeans, and wet corn we finally get on into dry corn. This is kind of like the home stretch. Or at least I like to think of it that way. We are simply in the field moving from field to field combining and taking corn to town or sorting it in grain bins.Then once harvest is over we dream about taking a vacation. But, the truth is the work doesn’t stop. We then start cleaning up equipment, servicing it for the end of the year, and getting it stored away to wait for another season. Then within weeks of putting one crop into the field we start picking out and buying next year’s seed corn.Welcome To Harvest On Our Farm!