Picking pumpkins, preparing for harvest at northern Illinois farm

WATERMAN, Ill. — Along with preparing for soybean and corn harvest, work at Wessels Family Farm includes transitioning from selling summer crops at their farm stand to fall products.

“We are down to the nitty-gritty for sweet corn. We’re on our last planting,” said Brandon Wessels, who is married to Kayla and farms together with his parents, Rob and Teri Wessels.

“Our sweet corn sales plummet after Labor Day, but we probably have a week or maybe two weeks left for sweet corn,” he said on Sept. 16. “We’ve had our mums, cornstalks and straw at the farm stand for a few weeks and we’re just starting to get our pumpkins there now.”

The sweet corn crop varies each year at the farm in DeKalb County in northern Illinois.

“Two years ago, we sold sweet corn through September and into October,” Wessels said. “But last year we ended earlier because we had heat that brought four to five plantings all ready at the same time even though we stagger our plantings.”

He walked through his pumpkin field to check on the potential harvest.

“Pumpkins are making me nervous because there are a lot of good-looking vines, but the fruit is not there,” he said. “Our regular pumpkins are looking decent, but our specialty pumpkins are not what we want them to be.”

The corn and soybean crops, Wessels said, for the most part look pretty good.

“We saw some sudden death creeping into the soybeans, but not substantial,” he said. “We’ll see when we roll across the scale.”

All the corn and soybean acres were sprayed with fungicide.

“Our own research has shown that spraying fungicide on beans pays year after year, there’s no question,” Wessels said.

“But for corn, some years it pays and some years it doesn’t,” he said. “We typically spray our corn, but last year with the commodity prices we chose not to spray our corn and we had late tar spot set in, so there was a 40-bushel difference.”

Normally, Wessels has a 50-50 rotation for corn and soybeans.

“But last year we had some corn-on-corn that really got nailed, so this year we sprayed everything,” he said. “We put insecticide in with the fungicide, so we really don’t have any bug problems.”

Since the combine was used to harvest the wheat crop, Wessels said, it should be ready for soybean harvest.

“We need to get it serviced and then tweak the settings for soybeans,” he said.

Wessels plans to harvest the seed beans first.

“My guess is we are probably two weeks out,” he said. “We are working on getting the bins ready for the seed beans because we have to make sure the bins are completely swept out and you have to clean out anything that will touch those beans.”

Recently, Wessels purchased a 13-inch-diameter auger with a swing-away to improve efficiency.

“The auger runs at 9,000 bushels per hour, so we will be spoiled,” he said. “It will be the designated auger for the seed beans.”

The goal is to harvest all the soybeans before switching to corn acres.

“We will watch the forecast and plan accordingly,” Wessels said. “We like to get the beans done first, but it might be advantageous to combine corn in the morning when the soybeans are not ready and then switch over to beans.”

Making the switch from a John Deere 9500 combine to a 9610 model was a big improvement for the Wessels operation.

“The 9500 was built when 180-bushels was a good corn yield and now we are at a 220-bushel average and up to 250 or 300 bushels when we have a really great year,” the farmer said.

“We were running an 8-row head, but the combine was built for a 6-row head, so we were putting more corn through the machine than it was built to handle,” he said. “With the 9610, we have 25% more capacity because instead of four straw walkers, this combine has five.”

For soybeans, Wessels uses a 30-foot platform.

“We would love to run a 35-foot platform since our combine could handle it, so we are in the market for one of those,” he said.

Recently, the farmer planted a cover crop for the first time on his wheat acres that were harvested earlier and the sweet corn acres that have been picked.

“We used a disc ripper and planted tillage radishes, oats and we mixed in fertilizer, as well,” Wessels said.

“We used a buggy and hopefully we did it the right way,” he said. “There are a lot of benefits to cover crops, but it has to pencil.”