From the Fields: Full-speed ahead

A quarter of an inch of rain slowed things down here yesterday. It was nice to have a slow day to get some things checked off the other to-do list. We have done a bunch of cement work at my house, and it gave me an opportunity to get the approach to the house filled in with gravel to the new cement to get my car back into the garage. Along with some rearranging and organizing in the shed, plus laundry — there is always laundry to get caught up on.

The weather has certainly turned colder with freezing temps on the overnights a couple times this past week. The wind has been brisk the past few days. Wind speeds forced a local elevator and a terminal on the river to halt operations on Saturday because they couldn’t make ground piles or fill barges. Luckily, we have storage for our crop, and it was full-speed ahead here.

This past week, we covered a lot of ground with the combine. A little over 110 acres of custom high-moisture corn combined for a local dairy, which they ground and put into a covered pile for cattle feed. We then switched the combine back to get going on our beans once again until the rain Saturday night into midday Sunday put us on pause. Corn yields were running 225 to 250 and moistures were from 18% to 28%. I was in a few different varieties — some with fungicide, some without and ground from flat, black, river bottoms to rocky, sandy hills and knolls. Corn was standing well and continues to stand after winds speeds in 20s gusting into the 30s.

Soybeans went from too wet to too dry. The last beans I was in were running 10.5% to 11% moisture, and I was very happy with yields in the last field seeing the 70s and even the 80s. This was ground that hadn’t had beans on it in five or six years and had good fertility. The other big field I was in was running average to a touch below what we usually expect. The forecast isn’t very bean combining friendly this week, so we may switch back to corn today. We have about a day of beans left. I’m sure there will be days to get beans done, but those days are getting fewer and fewer for 2020.

Ridott, Ill.