A few reminders for the fall harvest season

By ADAM M. SHEPARD

shepard.95@osu.edu

It sure doesn’t seem like five months has gone by already. My first week Isaac Gar­land and I were rush­ing around try­ing to get the crops planted at the County Farm, now five months later doing main­te­nance on the com­bine in prepa­ra­tion for harvest.

While the major­ity of us are ready to put this dif­fi­cult year far to the back of our minds there are a cou­ple things to remem­ber before we get going this fall. As every year poses dif­fer­ent strug­gles with the setup of har­vest equip­ment this year will be no dif­fer­ent. Dry weather dur­ing pol­li­na­tion has left us with larger than nor­mal ker­nels and less than per­fect pollination.

Corn fields affected by early sea­son winds can also be of con­cern with goose-necked stalks. Ear place­ment this year is also vari­able with some ears being placed very low on the stalk due to lack of ver­ti­cal growth. All of these vari­ables must be con­sid­ered to help achieve proper com­bine set­tings. For most of us that did not have wheat to har­vest this sum­mer we also need to pay proper atten­tion to the mon­i­tors in our machines. Take some time to ver­ify the proper data is listed in your mon­i­tor to ensure trou­ble free doc­u­men­ta­tion in the fields. Our yield mon­i­tors and pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture equip­ment is only as pro­duc­tive as we allow it to be.

Time is impor­tant to every­one this fall but a few extra hours at the begin­ning of har­vest to cal­i­brate the yield mon­i­tor can pro­vide valu­able data to ana­lyze this win­ter. Be aware of the fea­tures your pre­ci­sion agri­cul­ture equip­ment offers and try to uti­lize those fea­tures to make deci­sions for next grow­ing sea­son. Make notes of hybrids and vari­eties in each field to get a bet­ter idea of what worked well and what you might want to con­sider for next year. Any infor­ma­tion you can note while har­vest­ing this fall will help make more informed deci­sions for your oper­a­tion next year.

It seems like every year you can drive around the county and see one or two new grain bins being put up. As we head into fall it is impor­tant to make sure and spend some time get­ting stor­age facil­i­ties ready for use. Most of us fin­ish haul­ing in the win­ter and don’t spend too much time at the grain facil­i­ties until we are ready to put the first load in the wet bin. Now is the time to check spread­ers and per­form main­te­nance on stir-alls and grain fans/dryers.

Make sure har­nesses and safety gear is on hand to be used if you have to open lids or set augers. Clean up any old grain and dis­pose of accord­ingly. Give the grain dryer some atten­tion and ver­ify that any gates and flow switches are work­ing accord­ingly to save a cleanup down the road. Har­vest always seem to sneak up on us, if we take the time to per­form these tasks now then when it comes time to head to the field we will be ready.

Thanks to those that were able to attend the Estate Plan­ning sem­i­nar on Aug. 30, we had right at 70 par­tic­i­pants who asked great ques­tions and offered good con­ver­sa­tion to the group. Those in atten­dance came from High­land, Ross, Clin­ton and Fayette. I have hand­outs avail­able in the OSU Exten­sion office for those that were unable to attend but inter­ested in the information.

Now that I have had some time to get set­tled in I would appre­ci­ate some input from you all about what kinds of things you would like to see us do this win­ter. I’m in the process of kick­ing around some ideas of things I think are impor­tant but any­thing you would be inter­ested in hear­ing about please give me some ideas.

I’m also con­sid­er­ing some sort of a monthly newslet­ter to give gen­eral obser­va­tions and report on each end of the county along with offer­ing some infor­ma­tion on cur­rent events and a cal­en­dar of upcom­ing dates. If you have any ideas or sug­ges­tions I wel­come you to send them to shepard.95@osu.edu.

(Adam M. Shep­ard is Fayette County Exten­sion Edu­ca­tor, Agri­cul­ture and Nat­ural Resources.)

Posted by Tina Murdock on Oct 3 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.