For all of you who have had a rough day, here is a recount of my day this Wednesday.

It was a day I should have had time to take care of some ‘little things’ and prepare for winter. It’s been a few days, so at least I’m not as frustrated by it now!

Wednesday was one of those days… I started off by cleaning up the mess from a gremlin who must not have closed the hopper trailer door all the way on Halloween. Well, the backhoe wouldn’t start and it took me longer than planned. My reward for cleaning up that mess?? The dry bin ran over before I got back to the farm. So, I cleaned up that mess. My reward?? Hours later, I found out in the process, I must have got a stone in with the corn. It lodged in the metering rolls on the dryer. So, another mess was upcoming. Fortunately, I was able to run most of the corn out of the dryer before having to dump what remained on the concrete in order to retrieve the stone. Oh, did I mention we lost 15 hours of drying time and the wet holding bin was nearly full? (It’s a good thing it rained Thursday.)

Then, when I walked in the door for the night (late), I found a rent check that I thought went out in the mail. Now it’s late. It was one of those days!

I’m not a proponent of daylight saving time, but I’ll take that extra hour come Saturday night. And I won’t be cleaning up any more messes until harvest is complete.

Harvest finish line

Here’s the more relevant stuff going on at the farm. We’re closing in on the finish - less than 25% to go. It seems we’ve hit a floor as far as corn moisture. It doesn’t matter what we’re picking, it is between 19% and 21%

Yields have held up, but are more modest than we had hoped. We were disappointed when we harvested our National Corn Yield Contest plot. When walking the plot for measurements, it was easy to determine why. We took a big hit due to some wind. A quick count revealed 1 in 8 plants were broken off later in the season and did not produce an ear. This had to be from one of the storms we had in July. Many of the plants were snapped off waist high. A few attempted to put an ear on at an alternate node. If the loss due to wind damage was a linear relationship, we would have hit our goal.

I requested pricing on fall burndown chemicals today. Up to this point, probably 25% of our acres were put into cover crops. A good chunk of the middle half of our acres have been (or are slated to be) vertical tilled or chiseled. What we do with this last quarter will depend on the weather and winter annuals present at harvest time. We really prefer to have a clean slate going into planting.

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