This fall could offer an easy harvest or a hard one. Don’t just hope for an beautiful fall days. Instead, follow these tips from Farm Journal Field Agronomist Ken Ferrie.
1. Know your harvest capacity. Then you are able to allocate equipment and manpower appropriately. Allow for some interference from Mother Nature. “If you can harvest 80 acres per day, and you have 2,000 acres to harvest, you need 25 days of actual harvesting time,” Ferrie says. “But that number is in addition to days lost to rain, snow or breakdowns.”
2. Be ready to roll. “In late summer, your harvest team should perform preventive maintenance on everything needed for harvest,” Ferrie says. “Starting preparation late is a sure recipe for shortfalls and breakdowns.”
3. Prep your harvest crew. Along with equipment, calculate how much manpower you will need to pull off a timely harvest.
4. Use your pest team to prioritize fields. “Their job is to create a pecking order of fields that are struggling and are on the verge of going down, so you can harvest them first,” Ferrie says.
5. Harvest poorly-drained fields first. “If a field tends to get wet, harvest it while it’s dry enough to support combines, grain carts and trucks,” Ferrie says. “It may require moving equipment a little more, but that’s better than leaving tracks and ruts.”
6. Focus on grain quality. “Even a light rain can turn a well-adjusted combine into a seed spreader,” he says. “Monitor harvest loss every day.”
Read More: 12 Steps to a Weatherproof Harvest
Darrell Smith works alongside Ken Ferrie to break down the systems approach to farming.
