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An early start to harvest – out of necessity
Rising flood waters are forcing an Illinois farmer to start harvest a lot earlier than normal.
Martin Barbre says harvesting corn in the middle of August at 37 percent moisture isn’t ideal.
But, he doesn’t have much of a choice. “We’re not 100 percent sure the river is going to get it, but it’s going to get really close,” he says. “We just made the decision that if it was dry enough and we could get it out we would go ahead and get some of it out on the lower parts of the field,” he says. “That’s what we’re trying. And we’re learning how to dry really wet corn.”
He tells Brownfield if the crop goes under water at this point all is lost. “If it goes down – you just have a mess,” he says. “You have a full-sized corn plant that will lay down on the ground and you can’t harvest it – and you can’t get it dried up enough to get it back up. It becomes hard to even get the ground worked back up because you can’t get it chopped up.”
Barbre says they have to dry it in two steps. Right now they’re trying to get it down to 25 percent moisture. “We’ll put it in the bin and we’ll take it back out and run it back through to get it down to 15 percent,” he says. “And probably won’t plan on keeping it, either.”
AUDIO: Martin Barbre, Carmi, Illinois
Tags: Corn, Crops, Farm Income/Prices, Harvest, Illinois
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