We wrapped up harvest Wednesday afternoon! Dad took in the last of the corn while I was finishing off the double crop beans. It will be a bit before I finalize yields. I think we will take a ‘break’ next week. The kid’s schedules picked as high school girls’ basketball and middle school boys’ basketball both tipped off this week. The women’s college officiating season kicked off a couple of weeks ago for me.

Though it was a bit cold in October (early frost did hurt the double crop yield), few will complain about weather this harvest. Rain caused equipment to sit idle for only a few days this fall. Nobody will complain about the 60 and 70 degree weather we’ve been having lately. I’m sure there will be a lot of groaning this weekend when old man winter arrives and says the ‘s’ word!

It looks like we’ve got one more big push Thursday and Friday before the weather breaks this weekend. This time the push will be tillage. High fuel prices and short labor caused our sole focus to be on bringing in the crop. The last several years we did a lot of tillage at the same time the combine was running, but that did not happen this year. We are planning more no-till/reduced tillage, and we just didn’t have the labor. There were a couple days during fall break that Emry (our 12-year-old) was available, so we broke him in on some vertical tillage, but tillage machines sat idle the majority of the time.

All in all, it was a good harvest that lasted about seven weeks. The biggest battle this year was with the drying system. One contractor has already been out to evaluate what changes we can make that will allow harvest to run more smoothly. We had a few issues with the combines, but no real downtime as we were able to swap machines or change plans to keep grain coming in.

I know many here have finished up. I hope those of you still working have a safe and quick end to harvest!

The opinions of the author are not necessarily those of Farm Futures or Farm Progress.