Harvest 2015

     Four hundred eighty-eight bushels, the ticket said.  Really?  But the truck was heaped up pretty high.  It should have been at least 500  bushels. 

     Then I saw the weight-per-bushel—52 pounds.  Normal is 60 pounds per bushel.  Light wheat takes a bigger volume to make a bushel, if that makes sense, since a bushel is a measure of volume.

      But wheat is bought and sold by weight.  So if you sold a bushel of wheat in a one-bushel bucket, the buyer would protest because she only got 52 pounds.  The seller would have to either discount the price per bushel, or get a bigger bucket to hold enough extra wheat to make up the missing eight pounds.  

     The bad news is I may have trouble peddling it to an organic buyer due to the substandard weight.  The good news is that harvest is done, and I will have some wheat to sell, to the local elevator, if nowhere else.

     The grain bin is full to the brim.  That should be 3400 bushels, but with the light test weight, it will come in closer to 3000 bushels.  I had to haul 488 bushels of organic wheat and mix it in with the common ordinary stuff.   I’ll get the common ordinary price, too.  Oh well.

     The bottom line for this year’s harvest is about the same as last year’s yield-wise.  This year’s crop had twice the straw, twice the heads that had to go through the combine to get the same amount of wheat.

     The late May freeze is probably to blame for the lack of yield while rust from the wet spring promoted rust. Rust shuts the wheat plant down earlier than normal, causing shrunken kernels and the light test weight.

     One weird thing about this year, the least productive soil produced the best wheat.  Traditionally, the least productive soil is in the very center of the field where the old oneway disk leaves a dead furrow and down the corners, the same dead furrow.

     The soil is shallower in the dead furrows and has less nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorous.  As a result of the phosphorous deficiency, the dead furrows are usually a few days behind the rest of the field.  Apparently, the immaturity meant the wheat in the dead furrows wasn’t vulnerable to the freeze in May.  My theory, anyway.

      You can’t see the ground in the picture.  I couldn’t see it from the combine, either.  I had to slow down to cut this strip, the center of the field.  I didn’t get nearly as far before the bin was full.  “Tis an ill wind that blows no good.”  It was gratifying to see the old dead furrows do well.

    Harvest brought the usual headaches, weather, machine break-downs.

      Smoke, or humidity? Forest fires in Canada, they say. You can see the weeds that would get really out of hand if we got a prolonged wet spell.  Nothing like a good crop of weeds to make harvest really miserable.  There were plenty of weeds throughout the field.  Fortunately, we had only two light showers and one rain of over half an inch. 

    The combine had a couple of problems.  The first was a worn sprocket and chain, double chain, actually.

 

     I heard the chain slipping on the sprocket.  I looked everywhere for the noise (it makes a horrible noise).  The sprocket was in pretty poor shape by the time I looked in the right place.  Changing the sprocket would be a job, plus finding a replacement would be both challenging and expensive.

    I paid $40 for ten feet of chain, just a single strand instead of the double strand.  I ran the chain fairly tight, not over-tight and had no further trouble.

    The second more persistent problem was with the sickle drive.  After an hour or two of cutting, the new sections found their niche and the pounding sound of rivets striking the guards went away.  I thought I was home free.

      It had just dried out enough to cut about 5 p.m. Wednesday.  About 7 p.m. the sickle stopped.  I was cutting nothing.  Neighborly and his crew were just across the road.  I knew the trick to getting the arm off the combine, having done it to get the sickle in and out for rebuilding.  I threw the broken arm in the pickup and headed next door.  (Neighborly is a good welder.)

    He looked at the break and resolved to give welding it back together a try.  Off we went to his welding shop.  When he was done, far from submerging the hot metal into water to cool it, he insisted we cover it up for the return trip so cold air wouldn’t hit it.  Before we could get out of his yard, rain drops began to fall.  “Sure glad we covered that up,” he said.

 

     The shower brought harvest to a halt.  Thirteen percent moisture wheat soon became 14% and 15% moisture, too wet to bin.

     Neighborly and his crew all had an idea where I could find a replacement part from derelicts in the area.  They made a call or two and I made two or three calls, and the next morning, Brother Harry and I headed north and removed the exact same part from a dead combine.  It was just in case the weld didn’t hold.

      On Thursday, the sickle stopped again.  I didn’t even get out and look.  I pulled the combine up next to the shop and prepared to change the arm.  But the arm was still in tact.  A weld that I had made on the sickle pitman some years ago came undone.

  

    That was a much easier faster repair.  I rewelded the break.  I didn’t put any cold water on it either.  Neighborly called that night to see if his weld was still working.  He was happy to hear my story, my weld that failed, not his.     

     Friday, I was about an hour from finishing harvest, when the sickle stopped again.  This time, it really was the arm that broke again.  The weld didn’t fail, but it broke anew right next to the weld, which often happens, I’m told.

     It was a two-hour job to take the bearings out of the broken arm and replace the badly-worn bearings in the backup one.  Instead of finishing about 5 p.m., I finished a little after 7 p.m.

     This time, when Neighborly called, I had to give him the good-news (weld didn’t break) bad-news (broke next to weld) story.  He said he would make me a new one out of steel to replace the cast iron one this winter when he had time, one that would do the job much better.  I promised to remind him of that. 

     Moral:  It’s important to have good neighbors.   

     So harvest came to an end.  Now the cleaning and putting away equipment.