I’d like to take a moment to thank those who have called and emailed with concern over how the snowfall has effected our harvest. Knut and I just love snow. If we didn’t we wouldn’t live here. However, snow mid-October has the eerie effect of making the Christmas decorations in the store almost appropriate.
I haven’t lived on the farm for many years, but I’ll fill you in on what is going on based off of my observations of the last few years. I’ll fill in the other city-folk like me on how the snow and wetness is making harvest a challenge.
I am, however, not a spokesperson for the farm, and generally have no idea what I’m talking about. So take that into consideration.
We have 2 crops: soy beans and corn. A 3 crop rotation is ideal, and we used to grow wheat as well. It has become increasingly difficult to get a good wheat crop without pouring a massive cocktail of chemicals, so they decided to leave wheat alone for a few years and let the ground replenish itself. I’m sure down the road they will try wheat again. (Farmers and environmentalists actually have a lot in common, but don’t tell the farmers I said that!)
Soybeans mature first, and are harvested first. For the most part, all of our soybeans is sold as seed for the next year, and all of our corn goes to the local ethanol plant. In general, they wait until the plant has dried to the point of loosing all of its color. Dry is good when it comes to harvest time. The crop has to be dry so that we can store it over the winter and deliver it when the time comes.
“Wet” I’ve learned, means different things for each crop. With soy beans, they need to be dry to be harvested. It’s not that the fields are too muddy for the combines, it’s that the wetness is wicked into the dry plant, and makes the crop “messy.” I think, this means that the soybeans themselves get smushed and unusable during this process, or the plant itself jams up the machine, or both. The only term I got from the guys was “messy.”
“Wet” for corn gives us a different problem. The corn can be harvested when it is wet, and not damage anything. However, it has to spend a significant amount, then, in the grain dryer, costing the farm I’m guessing, thousands more a day in fuel required to run the drier. Not only that, since the dryer is running more, and the corn is spending more time in the dryer, the corn does not get through the drier as fast, and they have to stop combines, and wait for the drier to catch up to their pace. Follow me?
So, as of today, harvest is about one month late. One Month. In farm time, that’s a huge amount of time. The soy beans are ready, but wet. The corn still has tinges of green, and is wet. They have two combines that they usually tackle one crop at a time. Since the soybeans are used as seeds, they cannot be contaminated by corn, and if they switch a combine back and forth between crops, it needs to be thoroughly cleaned before it heads to a different crop. Because of this, they avoid going between crops as much as possible.
So that’s where the guys are. They’re starting to wonder if they should harvest some of the corn, even though there are tinges of green (meaning it’s not ready because of our cold summer) and it’s wet, and just dry the heck out of it in the drier, cutting into their profits, and then spend hours cleaning out the combine to go back to the soybeans when they dry out. Or should they just wait some more? That’s the debate.
The weather we’re looking and praying for is sunny, windy and dry. Warm would be a plus, but not that common this time of year. Sunny, windy and can happen any season. Please continue to pray for the guys and for the farm. Pray for our neighboring farmers too, as this weather is not just effecting us. Pray that God will use this situation to show His glory to any farmer around us who does not yet know Him.
Our situation is not hopeless. Frustrating, yes, but not hopeless. Seeing these guys work through this frustration has made me admire them even more.
Plus, now they have time to finally clean out my summer kitchen (a fancy name for a shed in our yard). I’m pretty sure that Knut and his dad are glad that I seem unable to upload pictures of them right now. O well. You’ll have to close your eyes and imagine it.
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