This summer and fall seemed to fly by after we got our wheat harvested in July, finished row-crop cultivating, got our covers planted in mid-August, and finished repairing one of our grain bins, the hot dry end of the summer had the beans ready before we were.
We started September 17th on our non-gmo food-grade soybeans. This is earlier than we usually start but the combination of earlier season varieties and the hot dry weather pushed them over the finish line very quickly and we had the soybeans harvested by October 2nd.
Even with the dry finish the soybean yields were better than expected. We got our wheat planted right in time with one of the few rain events and the wheat stand looks really good.
Following soybeans we had to deep clean our combine before we started on our first ever organic corn harvest! The process took us a little over a day but we wanted to make sure we had as minimal contamination as possible. We then took the first 90 bushels and sent them into town as a purge load just to make sure the combine was good and clean.
Our corn did way better than we expected, however, we did notice that the hot, dry finish effected yield. Normally our best yielding hybrids are long season corn, 110-114 day. This year our best corn was in the 105-10 8 day range. This also repeated in our 50 hybrid corn plot which was really fun to harvest.
Now that harvest is over we have to clean all of the harvest equipment, wrap up tillage for the year, and take some time to analyze harvest results and make changes to our management practices going into next year.
Overall it was successful year and we learned a lot!
