Harvesting between showers
Janet Kubat Willette
Date Modified: 11/12/2009 8:58 AM
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Jkubat@agrinews.com
SPRINGFIELD, Minn. -- One truck after another drove onto the scale to be weighed at Harvest Land Cooperative while on the other side of the complex, trucks waited in line to be filled with fertilizer.
Employees and farmers carried on light-hearted conversation while waiting for the beans and corn to spill from the hoppers of the semis. As soon as it was empty, the farmers jumped in the driver's seat and headed back to the field.
Employees kept in contact with each other through the radios clipped to their winter work jackets while in the office, Roger Vaske's cell phone and land line alternated ringing.
Rain was expected the next day, but on Oct. 28, farmers were hoping to bring in as much grain as possible. Harvest has slogged along this fall, with farmers getting a couple days in the field before rains push them back to the shed.
"We're harvesting between showers," said Vaske, branch manager of Harvest Land Cooperative in Springfield. Vaske, who's been in the grain elevator business for 28 years, said the harvest of 2009 will be remembered for great yields on the corn side and high drying costs. He said drying expenses could run into the $75 to $150 per acre range.
It's not only corn that's being dried this fall. For the first time in his career, Vaske said, soybeans need to be dried for storage. In the territory served by Harvest Land, soybean moisture has averaged 15.5 percent to 16 percent. The wettest soybeans came in at 25 percent moisture.
Soybeans are dried at a low heat to 13 percent moisture for storage.
Drying soybeans requires extra care because of the bean's oil content and potential for fire, Vaske said.
Harvest Land Co-op in Springfield is an 80-acre site with a 110-car unit train load out facility. A 110-car unit train can be loaded in nine to 10 hours at the site. Most grain is shipped from Springfield to the Pacific Northwest for feed and export markets.
The Springfield site was built in 1974 by cooperative elevators in Redwood Falls, Wanda, Lamberton, Sanborn, Springfield, Morgan and Sleepy Eye to be a 75-unit car shipping station for the cooperatives. In 1978, Morgan Farmers Elevator purchased the site from the other six cooperatives and in 1984 Morgan Farmers Elevator merged with Springfield Farmers Elevator to form Harvest Land. Harvest Land has six locations: Morgan, Morton, Springfield, Comfrey, Wabasso and Lake Benton. It also has a finance department, AgQuest, and is part owner Northland Capital. There are 200 employees companywide.
In a normal year, all the soybeans in the area would be harvested by now and two-thirds of the corn harvest would be complete. This year, 30 percent of the soybeans remain to be harvested and 10 percent of the corn is done.
"So we're just getting started" Vaske said.
Corn moisture content is averaging 28 percent to 29 percent early in the harvest. Test weight is light, averaging 52 pounds.
"It takes us back in time," Vaske said.
The growing season of 2009 brought just-in-time rains to create a good crop, but not enough heat to mature the crop. The crops went in early, but 10 percent to 15 percent of the corn didn't reach black layer before the first frost.
Vaske had hoped harvest would be done by Dec. 1, but now he's revised his projection.
"We're hoping to be done by the 10th of December," he said. "We'all be here as long as our patrons need us."
Fall fertilizer applications and fall tillage will be another challenge.
"Obviously, the farmers want to get their fertilizer on and their tillage done," Vaske said. "The dry fertilizer will go on, it's the anhydrous that's going to be a problem. We're hopeful we're get most of it on."
Vaske figures soybeans in the Harvest Land area will average 44 bushels to the acre and corn will average 180 to 200 bushels per acre.