Corn harvest

Life down on the farm has been slow, but very shortly things will be busy with fall harvest and wheat seeding.


This old girl is the combine that we harvest corn with.

We have started harvesting our non irrigated corn this past week. Most of the corn goes to our local "neighborhood" cattle feedlot. We sell some of our corn there directly from the field and they are very competitive on the price they pay for corn. They use corn everyday as a part of the feed ration to cattle, so they can take some corn that is too high in moisture for long term storage. When the moisture inside the kernel of corn is above 15% it will deteriorate over long storage periods and warm temperatures speed up the process.


Here is a partially harvested field of corn. We are cutting non irrigated portion of the field, foreground. The irrigated portion in the background will be harvested at a later date.

Our irrigated corn is longer maturity, planted a few days later, and had water when the planted needed it the most so it matures slower. Corn has an amazing ability to maintain grain quality and not fall down while standing in the field so it might not be harvested until November after soybean harvest and wheat seeding. Much of our irrigated corn will be stored on the farm and sold later to either the "neighborhood" feedlot, one of the feedlots within 100 miles of the farm, or an elevator that might blend higher quality with lower quality corn and will most likely sell it to a feedlot or ethanol plant. The demand for corn in my part of Kansas is higher than the supply which allows us to take advantage of good prices.

Wheat harvest down on the farm

We started harvesting wheat June 20th and finished July 2nd. There was only one day that the weather didn't cooperate with us and we couldn't harvest. Wheat doesn't have the ability to stand in the field after maturity like many crops can, so wheat harvest begins as soon as the crop is mature and we try to finish as quickly as possible to reduce weather related quality problems. The wheat yields and protein was respectable, we were a little concerned about the quality reports coming from Texas and Oklahoma before our harvest and quality related discounts. The first week I was in a combine and the second week I was planting and catching up on other work after I helped get the combines and crew running each morning.


A picture of all 3 of our combines working in the same part of a field during wheat harvest. Our combines are older, but they still get the job done.


Here I am unloading wheat on the grain cart while it's unloading on the semi. We commonly dump like this rather than waiting for the grain cart to finish unloading, besides Tyler does a great job of loading the trucks.


One of the combine's header is too wide to transport on the combine so it's transported on a trailer. I thought it would be neat to snap a picture of it looking in my side mirror.


We store some wheat on the farm. This happens to be Hard White Winter Wheat. White wheat from a farming perspective grows nearly identical to our Hard Red Winter Wheat. I think the berries have a sweeter taste, I love to grab a handful to snack on while unloading.


We also started irrigating our corn during wheat harvest. Weather that allows for a good wheat harvest is not the best for corn. Depending on how much rain we get between now and sometime in mid August, when corn reaches physical maturity, will dictate how much irrigation water we apply.