A Year in the Life of a Farmer: Harvesting, cover crop seeding in progress after delayed start

AgriNews will follow Chad Bell throughout the entire year. Each month, look for updates about the farmer and the decisions he makes on his farm.

VIOLA, Ill. — Harvesting conditions have improved significantly at Bell Family Farms since combining began for the farmers on Sept. 27.

“I was pretty worried about conditions for harvest since we have not had a wet fall since probably 2019,” said Chad Bell, who is married to Brittany and they are the parents of Amelia and Charlie.

“I thought this year was going to be the one, and it started out that way, but now it has gotten better,” said Bell on Oct. 21. “We did corn for a couple of days, about 10% to 15% of our corn acres, before we got rained out the first time and then we switched over to beans.”

The rain showers have been hit and miss with a few tenths of rain here and there on the farm in Mercer County in western Illinois.

“We are still finding some wet holes, but it is significantly better now since we have had the sun and 70 degrees,” the farmer said. “As of this morning we are about 40% done with beans.”

Corn yields so far, Bell said, are pretty good.

“We had one number that we did early that had crown rot,” he said. “Then we got into some corn that was much healthier and yielding well over actual production history for us.”

A couple of Bell’s soybean fields have yielded above APH.

“Otherwise, the yields have been significantly under the APH, and I don’t really know the explanation for that besides my guess is too much rain,” Bell said.

“But some people have had some really good yields, so bean yields have been more variable,” he said. “There have been some spots in the field that have been really good, but there are even more spots with lower yield.”

This is the first crop for Bell to harvest on this farm that he is renting from a distant family member.

“My grandpa originally started farming here near Joy, and the Bell family had a farm about a mile away,” he said. “There was not enough land for everybody, so my grandpa moved to our home farm to start farming on his own.”

Bell moved to this field on Tuesday evening after finishing a field on the north side of Aledo.

“I did some end rows so that we could park equipment overnight,” he said. “I think we could have kept cutting, but I did not want to harvest this field for the first time in the dark.”

Harvesting the 145-acre field would have been started a day earlier, if Bell did not have a bearing problem on his draper header.

“I heard a noise, and Hunter and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from,” Bell said.

“I was standing by the front corner of the cab, I could smell something hot and then I saw one little plume of smoke and we found the hot bearing,” he said. “We were able to get a mechanic out here to fix it, but we basically lost a day of harvesting.”

The first couple of weeks of Bell’s harvest were slower since they were working without a grain cart.

“We finally got our grain cart all put back together from the auger flighting project,” Bell said.

“Most of that went pretty smoothly until we got to the very end where we were replacing the glass window,” he said. “Hunter and I got everything else mechanically with the cart put back together by noon on Friday and then we spent the rest of the afternoon working on that window and we didn’t get it.”

The next day, Bell and his dad, Greg, were able to figure it out.

“Luckily, posting something like that on Facebook, you get all sorts of people who have had issues and have advice or know a trick to make it work,” he said. “It was the most aggravating part, that one window would keep us from being able to use the cart.”

This year, Bell has decided to seed more cover crops on his farm that he has the last couple of years.

“We try to keep up with that as we are harvesting, so as soon as I get a few acres done here, dad will start broadcasting the cover crop,” Bell said.

“We are using a fertilizer cart and spreading rye on cornstalks going to beans or wheat on bean stubble going to corn,” he said.

If the cover crops are planted behind the combine, before the first rain, Bell said, it has worked really well.

“The goal is to follow the combine as close as we can, because especially on cornstalks, when you get a rain, the residue is matted to the ground and we don’t get very good seed-to-soil contact.”

Earlier in October, Bell moved out the overstock of pigs in his 2,400-head wean-to-finish barn and spread out the rest of the pigs into the empty pens.

“Health-wise, the pigs are doing good,” Bell said.

“About a year ago I started getting compensated $1 per pig for the extra work involved with the overstock pigs,” he said. “It’s more work because you have more pigs to look after, and there’s a bit more management that has to be done.”

This year Bell is also serving as the pork ambassador for Illinois Farm Families, which involves providing social media content. That includes videos that feature his family, and recently his video demonstrated how he cooks bacon.

“I pan-bake my bacon, and I twist it up so that you can fit more bacon on the pan,” he said.

The videos are aimed at moms who live in urban areas, and earlier this year Bell recorded a tour of his pig barn.

“We try to keep the videos simple and easy to understand,” he said.

This is a challenge for Bell, who is more comfortable talking to a farm audience.

“Talking to my phone is so different than talking to a face,” he said. “I find myself focusing more at looking at the phone than thinking about what I am saying and then I have to start over.”