Blast Through Harvest Bottlenecks
By Charles Johnson
8/3/2007
Call him 1440 man. With 1,440 minutes in a day, each one counts when the corn harvest crunch hits. Marc Briney clocks his harvest operations to the minute on his Browning, Ill., farm. He hopes that efficiency will boost his chance of success this season when a huge corn crop heads to bins and elevators across the country.
“October is going to be a nightmare at elevators,” he says. “The lines are going to be horrible. I’ve got to get one-third of my crop out of the field, dried and hauled before the rush begins.
“I figure if I get ahead of the rush, I can harvest through October and store the rest of the crop,” he adds. “I can’t afford to wait in line. Every minute counts—all 1,440 of them. What you do with those minutes determines your efficiency and profit.”
With that in mind, he times each harvest operation to the minute. When something takes too much time, Briney figures out the problem and fixes it.
His 12-row corn header handles 2,500 bu. to 2,700 bu./hour. His two grain trucks haul 900 bu. That makes three loads an hour, 27 daily, six days a week. The truck has five minutes to leave the field, five minutes to dump the load, five to spare for record keeping at headquarters and personal matters, plus five minutes to get back to the field.
Any time that 20-minute cycle gets disrupted, costs run up. After Briney discovered it was taking 41/2 minutes too long, he fixed the problem by replacing a 400-bu. pit at his handling facility with an 850-bu. one.
“When I expanded the pit, that 41/2 minutes went away. With a smaller pit, things were backlogged there,” he explains. “Four and a half minutes may not seem like a whole lot, but over a day’s time it was costing me two hours. Add it all up and that’s a significant savings in time, labor and fuel.”
Efficiency test. Briney’s 1440 philosophy could pay off big time this year. Gary Schnitkey, University of Illinois farm management professor, believes that the enormous corn crop may test many farmers’ efficiency.
“It will stretch harvest systems. If I could stress one thing, it’s that the key is to keep the combine running,” Schnitkey says. “Anything you do to accomplish that is generally economic. If it means getting another grain cart or another truck, you’ve just about got to do it.”
A spreadsheet Schnitkey and his coworkers developed shows an eight-row combine running at 5 mph in 180-bu. corn covers 11.1 acres, harvesting 2,000 bu./hour—and that’s how much producers are going to have to truck out of the field to keep it moving, he points out.
This year, more than ever, nimbleness could pay. Running at breakneck speed may not, however. “Having that bigger pit lets us run at a slow, steady pace without a bottleneck. When you’re going just flat-out, that’s when you have breakdowns. If I run the auger at full capacity, one rock will shear a bolt,” Briney says. “What I’m after is consistency, a steady pace.”
Breakdowns prove costly, a lesson he learned all too well last season. “I lost five days because the combine broke down. I had to rent a machine for $20,000. That’s a direct loss. That’s something I can touch and feel,” he says. “It happens. But I have to take every precaution to keep things like that from happening again, especially this year.”
Several elevators in his area added storage capacity this year, ramping up to handle the big crop. “They saw it coming, and a year to a year-and-a-half ago started adding storage,” he says. “Elevators here live on expanding foam and duct tape. I’ve never seen such a rush to update equipment. It’s something farmers should have seen coming, but most waited until too late to try to order bins for this year, so they couldn’t get them in time.”
Briney’s 300,000-bu. on-farm grain handling facility should be enough to store his crop with normal yields. He anticipates delays delivering corn off the combine, however.
This scenario could repeat itself across the nation, says Jerry Fruin, an ag economist at the University of Minnesota specializing in transportation issues. “Where are we going to put all this corn?’” Fruin wonders. “I think we’re going to see the biggest corn piles of all this fall, and last year we saw some pretty good-sized ones. We have to remember that, if we use it for two or three months—if we get corn sold and used by Feb. 1—well-run ground storage is the cheapest storage we’ve got.
“This year, if the export markets hold up, we’ll probably get rid of this corn crop with all deliberate speed,” he adds. “I don’t think farmers will have a big problem. For the most part, they knew what they were doing at planting. Planting time has a bigger peak machinery use than harvest. With reasonable weather, harvest should not be more difficult than usual.”
Wet corn. Two hopper bins for wet corn give Briney added flexibility. ”Invariably, things go wrong. I can keep the corn in the wet bins cool enough if there’s a breakdown. They have aeration rockets,” he says. “All of a sudden, the wet holding bins become storage. I can put dry corn in and hold it. That’s become priceless to me.”
He watches grain elevators to get new ideas for storage. Having a couple of brothers in the business of building grain storage facilities helps, too, he says. “That’s why I got the wet bins. We see that elevators have them, and have them for a reason. What a great tool they are.”
Grain storage will be a hot commodity in his area soon after harvest, Briney forecasts. “By the time a lot of people made up their minds to buy bins, they couldn’t get them,” he explains. “If you made the decision in February or March, it was already too late. Now, if you want to get bins put up in 2008, you need to get the order in by November at the latest.
“There are more bushels out there, but we have to be set up to handle them,” Briney says. “Farmers want to be done with corn by the first couple of weeks of October. Add more bushels without more handling capacity and you can’t do that.”
Harvest efficiency requires every piece of the puzzle to fit neatly into place. Combines and trucks can’t break down. Drivers must be secured. Extra truckers, if necessary, must be lined up early. Grain dryers, augers and dump pits have to work without a hitch.
“Now, more than ever, you have to pay attention to detail. You just can’t afford to have any glitches,” Briney says. After all, there are only 1,440 minutes in a day.
New harvest strategies for former cotton growers
Four-dollar corn enticed many cotton farmers this year to decrease or even drop their long-time centerpiece crop and focus on corn. Tennessee alone planted 290,000 more corn acres this year than in 2006. That made for big changes in both mindset and machinery.
Brandon Hughes and his dad, Gary, grew 2,300 acres of cotton last year on their Brownsville, Tenn., farm. This year, they planted no cotton and went with 3,500 acres of corn, soybeans and wheat. “I don’t remember a year when we didn’t have cotton,” Hughes says.
Their farm had a 20,000-bu. grain-bin facility. This spring, though, for peace of mind, they bought used bins totaling 50,000 bu. “We can hold enough to keep cutting if the elevator fills up or breaks down for some reason,” he says.
Though the corn price pushed their change, Hughes says they had long considered rotating with grain crops. “It was the money, but it wasn’t just about money. We had Roundup-resistant weeds in cotton, and this will give us a chance to work on them. Rotation is good. Some of this ground has been in cotton year after year for a long time. The market gave us an opportunity to do what we’ve been needing to do.”
Stoney Hargett always considered himself a cotton farmer. Last fall during harvest near Alamo, Tenn., his cotton picker burned. Corn prices were beginning their escalation. “I had a question to answer: ‘Do I buy a new cotton picker or a combine?’”he says. “I thought about it, but didn’t really have to think long. Now this farm doesn’t have a stalk of cotton on it. We’re all corn and beans.”
Hargett already owned a trucking company running five truck trailers. The grain boom encouraged him to buy two more. “I already owned one hopper-bottom trailer. Now I’ve purchased two more, getting ready for this scenario. That allows us options,” Hargett says. “If we need to get the crop off, we can pull those truck drivers in on our fields. If I need to put one or two in there to keep the combine going, I will."
“Longer term, I have to think about building grain bins,” he says. “It’s a definite advantage to be able to hold at least part of the crop.”
Hargett thinks he will have a smooth harvest this time, even without on-farm storage, thanks, in part, to nearby river terminals. “If the granaries run 24 hours a day, I can keep unloaded, I think. I’ll run the combine during the day and the trucks at night,” he says. “Of course, everything now is just theory. I’m hoping that’s how it works out.”
Kevin Earnheart, headquartered near Friendship, Tenn., shifted crop acreage this year, and now grows 1,400 acres of corn along with 2,600 cotton acres. “I had never grown corn on this scale,” he says. “I can cashflow $4 corn. But cotton at 50¢ to 60¢/lb.? No way.”
With no on-farm storage, he will deliver corn to Mississippi River terminals near Dyersburg, Tenn. “I might have to run four or five trucks. Unloading is the question, though. It could be a real mess. I have a combine with a corn head, two trucks and a buggy, and several folks around here are wanting to haul corn,” Earnheart says. “You know what? I hope it is a headache to get out of the field. That means I made a good crop. We’ve had a bad drought this summer. Right now, I’m not real sure what the corn is going to do.”
Dry weather undoubtedly hurt 2007 corn yields, but that may not deter west-Tennessee farmers from planting corn again next year. In fact, some have already booked sales of 2010 corn.
“There’s been a perception that we can’t grow corn,” says Richard Buntin, Crockett County, Extension director. “Historically, the yields weren’t there. But it wasn’t going on our better ground. University of Tennessee variety trials here have averaged 200 bu./acre for several years. Folks raising corn here are making decent yields.”
Crockett County farmers usually plant about 86,000 acres of cotton, making it the state’s No. 2 cotton county. This year, they went with about 60,000, with corn stealing those acres from cotton.
“I love raising cotton but, ultimately, I’m in it to make a living. What crop is profitable is what I’m going to raise,” Hargett says. “That’s why I’m in grain now.”
To contact Charles Johnson, e-mail cjohnson@farmjournal.com.
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