|
||
 |
|
||
|
Short harvest season Rain, frost and quickly shortening daylight hours are elements of every harvest at The Pas. Frost can hit as early as late August. September is often wet and snow can make an appearance in October. By November, the ground is frozen and moose hunting is in full swing in the region. Last fall, the weather in September was very wet. Frank says, “We had lots of rain during harvest. Some of the older farmers were saying that was one of the worst harvests we’ve had. We just had to sit and wait and watch, but we were ready as soon as the rain stopped.” They had recently traded a pair of New Holland TX combines for new CX840 units with 30-foot grainbelt headers. They wanted more capacity and they got it. They also gained one to two miles per hour in harvest speed. “Our biggest day last year was 520 acres for the two machines,” Frank says. “We harvested close to 25,000 bushels of wheat that day.” That beat the previous best performance on the farm by about 200 acres and 8,000 bushels. Harvesting in wet conditions In the area around The Pas, growers wait until about noon to start harvesting. Heavy dew forms on everything overnight, often starting to accumulate long before midnight.
User-friendly New Holland has kept the high-capacity CX user-friendly, Frank notes. “I was driving one combine that day, and Dad was driving the second one until my brother Walter took over later in the evening. I had to show Dad how to work some of the controls, like the auto-header height control, but he was fine. Dad is in his 70s.” Their canaryseed harvest showed another measure of marked improvement. “It’s difficult to harvest canaryseed,” Frank says. “We can’t have the cylinder running very fast, because we’ll peel it and turn it into dockage. The straw is pretty tough, too.” Canaryseed has a plump, small seed. It’s a bit longer than flax, and flows like water. Its primary use is for birdseed. The brothers slowed their CX cylinders to 600 or 650 rpm in the canaryseed, about 200 rpm less than in wheat. In some standing wheat, they had harvested at 5 mph or more; in the canaryseed they slowed to 3 to 4 mph. “The canaryseed got hit hard by hail, so our yield was down and some of it went flat on us, but we were still able to go along fairly decently with those grainbelt headers,” Frank says. All of their wet grain in 2002 went through the heated grain dryer in their yard to salvage the best possible grade and to keep it safe in storage. “We’re not afraid to use the dryer,” Frank says. “It’s part of our harvest combine-wise. We’re over-equipped, in a way, but last year we were glad we were over-equipped. Otherwise, we probably would have been left with feed wheat, and we probably would have dried even more than we did. “A few farmers contemplated leaving crop overwinter. One guy did some harvesting in the snow showers. For us, it was business as usual. When we were done, we even did a little bit of custom work.” With such a brief harvest window, they feel, it is better to be over-equipped than caught unprepared due to unfavorable harvest conditions. “There’s no such thing as a custom harvester with more than one machine here. In some respects, we’re prepared now for another 1,000 acres, if that comes around. We’d rather have that than scramble for harvest equipment.”
|
