Warm, dry weather contributes to smooth harvest

SHABBONA, Ill. — Warm, dry weather is helping farmers in northern Illinois to quickly harvest corn and soybeans with little need to run the crops through a dryer prior to storage.

“Our soybean harvest has been very smooth,” said Berkeley Boehne, who together with his brother, Vaughn, raise corn, soybeans and wheat on their DeKalb County farm where they also feed pigs and operate a custom manure application business.

“We pretty much had three planting windows for corn and soybeans and we were able to get the first two plantings of soybeans cut,” Boehne said.

“We were waiting for the last 500 acres to finish of the late May planted beans so this is the last bean field for us,” he said on Oct. 10. “We will finish beans today and we will finish planting wheat tomorrow and these are great conditions for that, too.”

“The timing has worked out great, the soybeans are too dry, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the yields, but our farm usually does better on dry years,” he said. “Our beans are a little above average in the high 70s to low 80s, which is refreshing.”

Boehne plants all his early corn — 103- to 109-day — first.

“We got that out before it got too dry, so we’re about a quarter done with corn,” he said. “It was 15% to 20% moisture and we dry some of that.”

Even though 16% moisture corn is nice, Boehne said, he would rather harvest corn at 18% to 20% moisture and dry it a little.

“Corn at 16% to 18% moisture is really hard to run through a dryer because it is moving so fast,” he said.

Corn yields are also above average for Boehne.

“They are ranging from 240 to 270 bushels and most of that was on manure ground, so that’s a huge part of it,” he said.

Although corn and soybean prices are not the best, Boehne said, yield will make up for some of the shortfall.

“We have a lot of product to get consumed in a year, so we need some trade deals,” the farmer said.

“We tried non-GMO food grade beans with DeLong this year and they were a huge success,” he said. “Weed control is a little harder to manage so we use a different chemical program, but we got higher than expected yields.”

As he has been harvesting, Boehne has seen few problems with pests or weeds in his corn and soybean fields.

“It was not too dry or too wet to cause problems. We had our Pioneer customer appreciate dinner in September and they said there were no concerns,” Boehne said.

“The standability and the test weights for corn have been great,” he said. “We do full starter on our corn and full fungicide on our corn and beans.”

There have been a few combine fires in the area.

“We had a combine fire in 2016 and we won’t forget that one,” Boehne said. “Vaughn was combining corn, the hydraulic pump burned up and the combine was fully engulfed in less than two minutes.”

The farmers tried to get the GPS components out of the combine cab, but the fire spread too quickly.

“The combine was a total loss,” Boehne said. “With the wet harvest, 2016 was a rough year.”

The brothers are about two weeks ahead of schedule with their manure applications.

“We finished the applications on the seed corn acres on Oct. 4 and we’re about done with our personal manure applications,” Boehne said.

“For our late summer manure application, we did tests with the nitrogen stabilizer, Instinct, on almost 400 acres,” he said.

“We want to be able to lower our manure application rates and spread it on more acres. We left some checks to compare so we’re excited about that.”

Tillage work has started on the Boehne farm.

“We have a couple of part-time guys that do tillage work and this year we’re transitioning back to a little more deep tillage because we’re not seeing good weed control on waterhemp,” the farmer said. “Since it’s a drier year, we have the opportunity to do that.”

Most of the bean stubble ground on the farm will get an application of manure.

“It will probably be chisel plowed or vertical tilled, depending on the field,” Boehne said. “We no-tilled all our wheat into soybean stubble.”

Boehne plans to knife in anhydrous on about a quarter of the acres.

“We’re trying to get away from summer sidedressing because we’ve got enough other things going on,” he said.

“If we put manure on a field, we don’t sidedress in the summer because we consider the manure as our long-term release nitrogen.”

If it stays dry, Boehne will work down some ground for spring prep so he can plant right into the stale seedbed.

“That gives us some flexibility for no-till soybeans,” he said. “Even for corn, we did a little bit of that this year and I really enjoyed it.”

With less than ideal conditions, a lot of damage can be done with the first pass of tillage in the spring, Boehne said.

“The stale seedbed really saved us this year, because during the last planting window, it never dried out,” he said.

“We didn’t have frost so that messed up the ground, but we were able to plant right into those fields.”