From the Fields: ‘Going to be a pretty great crop’

We’re hauling soybean screenings and splits for Consolidated Grain and Barge out of Dwight. They’re getting ready for fall harvest and making final preparations for that. Consolidated Grain and Barge has a facility at the intermodal site at Joliet where they load their containers and put the containers on the trains.

While it’s not everybody’s cup of tea to have to drive to more or less the city to do this sort of thing, it’s been a great thing for us. We are very fortunate to have that in our neck of the woods. I serve on the Evergreen FS board and I talk to a lot of people from southern Illinois. They don’t have the grain markets that we do up here, and it provides us quite a bit of extra access for markets.

We’re also getting our combines ready to go at home. We’ve got some early soybeans and I think we’ll be combining beans by the end of next week, the Sept. 12 time frame, if not the first part of the following week, Sept. 20-21, somewhere in there.

We grow some seed beans for Syngenta and they have a really early variety that we planted this year. So, they are kind of ahead of everything else that we’re going to do. We might try some corn the end of next week, too. I’ll see. I hand-sampled some corn a week ago and it was 35%. So, I don’t know if we’ll try some corn the end of next week or not. We may get itchy and just try it.

I’m pretty optimistic with the crop. We had a little wind damage in some places, but for the most part I think it’s going to be a pretty great crop.

We’ve also been busy hauling lime for fields so we can pile it before the harvest starts. I’ve also been finishing some dirt work projects. That’s pretty much it other than baseball, football and all the fun stuff the kids do.