2011 Harvest Season Completed!!

The past 30 days have been SUPER busy.  I'm so very happy to say that on Tuesday, October 25th we tossed the last of the tires on a feed pile, covering the high moisture corn which will be fed to the cows over the coming year.  Here are some facts about our high moisture corn pile:

- We harvested 180 acres of corn for grain, using a combine to take just the kernels off the cob.  The average yield early in the season was about 185 bushel to the acre, however some terrible winds dropped the yields in some fields to about 160 bushel per acre from corn stalks braking off, making it impossible for the combine to harvest. 

- Taking an average yield of 160 bushel per acre, off of 180 acres, puts the total corn harvested and stored on farm at 28,800 bushel.  Today, corn traded on the market at $6.50 per bushel.  Not having a feed bill to the tune of $187,200 JUST FOR CORN, makes all the hard work of growing our own crops worth it.  It also makes us grateful for being provided with a good growing season, allowing us to take some corn for grain.  During a poor crop year, we don't have that luxury.

- There were 6 of us out pulling plastic and tossing tires on the pile on Tuesday.  I challenged the group to come up with a guess to the number of kernels of corn on the pile.  Guesses ranged from 4 billion to 6 trillion.  Based on "Yahoo Answers", there are 72,800 kernels in a bushel of corn, so a rough estimate is that we combined, ground and stored 2,096,440,000 kernels of corn. That's a tough number to read - it's just over 2 billion kernels.

- When we plant corn, we plant about 39,000 seeds per acre.  On the 180 acres of corn that we harvested for grain, we would have planted 7,020,000 seeds, with a return over 2 billion kernels or a return of nearly 300 kernels for every one planted!  To bad the stock market can't provide that!!!

Anyway, here are some videos of the process we go through once all those seeds get back to the farm.

The View from my Office!!

The weather the past weeks has been AMAZING!!  We have had temps in the 70's which is unseasonably warm for us this time of the year.  Last week one day, I had to take wheat seed to a field of ours about 7 miles from the farm.  While it could be said that the tractor I had to drive was far from comfortable (it's a very old Farmall 350), the trip was enjoyable none-the-less.  The views along the country roads were breathtaking with the sun shining and showing off the fall colors.  Roundtrip it probably took me a solid hour to get to the field and back and that probably ranked right up there with one of the best hours of the week! 

Corn Silage Harvest is Finished!!!

This year, we harvested about 750 acres of corn for silage.  September was particularly busy since while we were filling our 2 existing bunkers, we were also pressing to get a new feed storage pad built.  In addition to hiring an engineer to design the pad, we needed to submit our plans to the DNR and get their approval. 

The above picture was taken on a Friday, September 16th.  You can see the large earth movers on the left side of the mirror - they were working on building our vegetative treatment area.  This is a 5 acre piece of land that will act as a buffer should any nutrients run off the feed storage area.  The large rectangular piece to the right of the mirror is undergoing final grading and where 4" of asphalt was poured the following week.

This next video was taken the following week when the silage pad was complete.  My nephew's Austin and Nate found this to be a great place to run with their RipSticks.  Unfortunately, they only had a few days before we started putting silage on the pad.

This video was taken from the pack tractor as we were putting feed on the new silage pad. 

The overall size of this pile is 120' x 275'.  In all it holds about 5800 ton of corn silage off of 250 acres.  It took this group (plus 4 others not pictured) about 2 hours to roll out the plastic and lay out about 2400 tires on the pile.