We finished harvesting the 21st of October.  Actually one of the earlier finishes for us.  Only two real breakdowns with the combine and they were small ones. One of the hose clamps on the air inlet pipe on the turbocharger broke. The other was a drive chain on the corn head.  Semi’s were a problem early on, but the old 99 International once it was running ran great.

Oh by the way, this is Judi’s lessor half posting this, she is still trying to get caught up from being part of ” #occupycombine in #harvest11 “.  She also has been helping me with fieldwork for next year’s crop. We did get one of our new wells hooked up to the house.  Great to have “enough” water.  We also added to the kids show string of heifers this last weekend, more on those girls later.

She is really a great combine operator and she does look for the last row of corn or soybeans every year.  Found it two Fridays ago.  I took her out to our favorite Italian restaurant last week. We celebrated and then went home and went back to work.  She is just really busy right now, getting caught up with the kids and house stuff and computer stuff, and well the life of a farm wife/ farmer.

She would  say she is just glad it is over for this year.

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Theo (13 year old) drives the combine in a corn field. He tells what he likes and doesn’t like about it. Theo says it’s pretty easy when you watch and someone tells you how. He likes combining beans more. I know. He’s young yet.

I am at the point in harvest where the days are all running together. William keeps talking about “when we get done with this field, we’ll go to that field. Then we’ll switch to beans and haul the bean head to another field.” I hold up my palm and say talk to the hand. (not really) But I did say, “Whoa, stop. It’s going to be a few days before we are done in the current field. A million things could go wrong in that time changing everything. So I’m not listening.” He’s counting loads and acres left. I’m just driving ’til I run out of fields. Different mindsets to the same end.

So the harvest update is fairly redundant. I have lost track of how many days we’ve been in corn. I’m seeing rows of corn plants being shoved into a feeder house in my sleep. I’m not complaining really. As long as the combine and trucks are running, we are getting closer to the prize.

The combine did lose some power today. William thought it may be the fuel filter, since we just used the transfer tank for the first time in awhile. But Russel across the road, who used to be a red IH dealer says the air filters need replaced. He was right. I took out the filter and it was crammed with dust. We’ll replace both sets of filters tomorrow. Tomorrow more corn.

Had a big day for us this Sat. We harvested 80 acres of corn in three fields. We hired a truck for the weekend since our semi is still getting worked on. I was in the combine cab for 11 hours. Only leaving once for a potty break. William drove the grain cart. Unloading on the go really gets the combine over the acres. Yields were around 150 bu/acre and 20% moisture. The truck driver said he didn’t think he could work for me. I don’t think I would want to work for me either. Eating while shelling corn is not good for the digestion.

Tell me about your long hours.

We missed the rain again this weekend. So hauling water for the houses and cattle will continue. But today it drizzled enough to keep us out of the field so I can catch up on my blog posting of harvest. I am continually trying to come up with interesting things to share since driving a combine back and forth in a field is pretty mundane. The following videos pretty much sum up the last few days since my previous post.

Day 7

The boys will be extremely happy when we finally get all the bins full of corn and we move on to some fields away from home. We fill the drying bins. Then once the corn is dry enough we transfer it to the regular bins for storage til winter. Then we move the auger back to the drying bins to fill them up again ’til the corn is dry and repeat. This is the first year that they have spent so much time at this process. I try to warn them that it’s the beginning of many many years.

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Day 8

In these two videos taken today, I tried to show the fields after they were harvested. Then the GreenStar monitor shows the yield maps for each field.

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It is definitely a love/hate relationship with the GreenStar. But I did add my first flag to a map today. But I don’t know how to remove it. I was on the end rows dumping into the grain cart just figuring out the flagging. And I did make a new home page with the flags in the layout. I should have taken a picture of the screen. Will do that tomorrow and show you. William didn’t seem all that impressed with these accomplishments. He just said, “But you don’t know how to remove the flag.” He didn’t score many points today.

Event of the day: Our first breakdown. The chain that drives the right side of the corn head broke. You know about this problem quickly when you start plowing rows of corn. This is a messy fix since the chain is in a sealed oil bath. We got it fixed and running again. I ran the combine ’til about 5:30 when we had enough wet corn in the bin. Next we moved augers and wagons to transfer corn from the first drying bin to a regular bin with a fan. William will fill that bin tomorrow morning.

William fixing the chain on the corn head.

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Not taking it too fast yet. The corn is still a little wet at 24%. It is still averaging 175 bushels/acre. I would say we took out about 35 to 40 acres today. The guys switched to another drying bin after filling the first.

I am having a little difficulty getting the GreenStar screen to display the info I want. I got the acres for the individual fields to show but now I can’t zoom in and out of the map. Will be pecking away at it again tomorrow. There are some tile risers I want to flag on the maps. So I put out a tweet asking how to do that. @AaronBokeck was nice enough to tweet back the steps. Thank you. I was thinking that if I had auto steer on the combine I could tweet a lot more.

I have to decided to capture this harvest season day by day as much as possible. We have started pretty much on schedule with only a few “hiccups”. Stopping and starting because of cattle work, wells going dry, hauling water, meetings, drizzle ect. The corn is testing around 22%. So we can only fill the drying bin so much at a time.

Day 1:

Mike came with his weigh wagon to calibrate the GreenStar monitor. Got the cheat sheets out to remind me of what buttons to push. Only had to call the guys at the dealership twice for all the different settings. At the Farm Progress show, we were told that the dealership will be able to see our screen on their computer to see what in the world we are trying to describe.

The kids have cleaned out the bins and replaced the doors. The boys’ job is to watch the auger dump loading the bins. Bella is to keep track of the pastures and water situation.

The following video is a short one. It was taken before I had the idea of a daily harvest log. If you would like to follow along with our daily harvest activities, subscribe to the post updates in the sidebar. New entries will be sent to your email. And ask any questions you might have.

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After letting William drive for a while, he complained that the seat was too low. Well besides my being 4 inches shorter than he, I don’t want the seat cutting the circulation in my legs. I reminded him that both Phil on Deadliest Catch and Alex on Ice Road Truckers both were hospitalized from blood clots caused by sitting for long periods. He didn’t think I had much to worry about. Those guys sat for months and months. I am in the combine for around 40 days. I didn’t tell him about what I saw on the show Monsters Inside Me.

I would have knocked on wood after my last post. That day I had another conversation with Loren after the head quit raising on its own. I thought there was an adjustment that I hit wrong. He said to check the hydraulic levels. They were fine. I kept running. Then the head wouldn’t raise at all. Next BGC died and buzzers went off, lights flashed. We had a problem. By this time I was letting William drive. He got  it running again but there was no steering. Struggling with the wheel, he backed it to the other end of the field. We called the service dept. They said we shouldn’t have kept it running after it died. It may have burned up the main gear case that is lubricated by hydraulic pump. A story was told of how someone just did that last week. His combine was still in the shop. It was a big mess. We thought we were screwed.

If you have to have a service truck come out, you want one this size.

Not this size.
It means that the problem is bad enough that the combine needs to be worked on in the shop and you can’t drive it there. So after John determined that there was no hydraulic pressure anywhere. He called for the semi to haul it back to the dealership. I have never seen how a combine is loaded on a trailer to transport. So I got an education. While I stood around taking pictures thinking this should make a great blog post, the guys loaded up the combine.

After the trailer was unhooked, the combine was dragged by huge strap up on to the trailer.

Then the trailer is hooked back up to the semi. The ground was too soft, William pulled semi and all out of the field to the road.

So BGC was off to the shop.

The good Lord was smiling on us this day. It turned out a shaft to the hydraulic pump broke. The mechanics were able to fix it the next day.  BGC was running again the day after that. And, knock on wood, it is running great.