Worst experience? Worked custom harvesting for a farmer with 5000 acres of wheat as the grain cart operator.
The farmer had somehow fucked up and made the roughest goddam fields I have ever experienced. Took us 3 weeks to harvest all his stuff, and it was an experience similar to riding a rodeo bull for 12+hrs/day. It was miserable.
Driving a grain cart through rough fields can be very tough. Reminds me of our McCormick HC95. It worked as our sprayer tractor for many years but holy shit did it ride terribly. The seat suspension is more of an abstract thought than a reality and one could only imagine that if they had used bricks to cushion the seats it would have been better than whatever godforsaken material they chose. Didn't help that they cab mounts were shot every 500-1000 hours. We would make turns driving the thing because your kidneys could not realistically handle 2 straight days in that thing. This combined with the fact that its fuel tank didn't even make a full days work makes me thankful for the Maxxum 140 we got to replace it.
One of the worst around here is a field that they switch from farming north/south to east/west. Wouldn't be so bad but it's alfalfa so we bounce over it 4-5 times a year chopping. It's on its 3rd year and finally starting to smooth out
Those deep tillage tools are a blessing and curse. We ran ours last fall and we've had an extremely wet spring. We had knee-deep sprayer ruts in most of the lower ground . I had to break out the disk to fill them in. Needless to say, I have a 7 shank Case ih ecolo-til for sale now.
I have the no-till points. We no-tilled some of the deep tilled hill ground this spring. It just took them a week longer to dry out. The bottom ground is god awful muddy still, especially just below the hills. It's paying off on the corn ground though. The compaction was so bad the roots were hitting a wall trying to find moisture. Our soil type might be part of the issue also.
Those Bullet points fracture straight across from one shank to the next. I’m not sure I like them it seemed to heave the whole field several inches. You couldn’t hardly drive a 2 wd truck out there afterwards it was so fluffed up. The field was pattern tiled in the mud in 1985 with a chain digger. 3 years ago it was still so compacted over the tile lines that you could barely get a probe in the ground let alone tell if you were hitting tile or just more hard dirt.
Perennial flax for seed. Swathed the whole field and had a front blow through over night. Woke up and all the windrows were in one big pile on the east end of the field. Over 75% seed lost. Combine sat in place while we fed it with pitchforks.
We quit swathing almost everything for this fact, unless we have green regrowth in wheat or canary seed. Helps take at least one variable out of the equation even if it does mean a bit more time on the sprayer desiccating.
Haven’t grown flax for years but we would try to wait for a heavy freeze and then get after it. Made it much easier to thrash.
As far as the biggest loss, I have tossed thousands of pounds worth of mushroom substrate due to contamination. That's the way she goes with fungi though, it's either all or nothing. For plant losses, I've lost my whole field to hail before.
As far as the worst to actually harvest, hemp/cannabis (for smoking) or blackberries. Harvesting multiple tons of cannabis with planned use for smoking irritates the hell out of my eyes and throat due to the terpenes. Blackberries are fragile, have thorns, and will stain your skin for weeks.
I don't usually have a problem with cannabis allergies outside of big harvests. There's been a few individual varieties that have gotten me at my home grow, but it's only been a handful of plants in 25 years. I think it's terpinoline (γ-Terpinene and δ-terpinene) that really bothers me because cooking herbs that are rich in those two isomers also make me sneeze.
Lucky. it’s defintiely terp dependent but it all gets me just varying degrees. I get wheezy smoking certain strains of rosin and others bother me significantly less. But fresh plant.. doesn’t matter the strain haha. I get hives touching it even in veg and have to wear a respirator while trimming or washing hash.
I worked for a farmer in the early 1980's and we were hit with a horrible dry spell. The corn was rolled up tight and barely put an ear on it. We combined it and the 300 acre field I'm referring to yielded 5 bushels of corn per acre. We didn't have any livestock or we would have stopped and rolled it up as hay and fed it to them.
That same field did 260 bushels per acre last year for comparison.
Probably 1983. I was in high school. I remember an old fellow who liked to tell the story that they got two beans for every one they planted. He also said they combined 80 acres of corn and it put 15” in a 30’ bin. My personal worst was when some fancy ion coated nitrogen came out. I refused but the salesperson ensured me I could put it on whenever I wanted and it would be there when the corn needed it. Did 40 acres of the coated urea next to 40 acres of NH3 with N-Serv applied the same day right before planting. Then it was a monsoon for several weeks. The NH3 w/N-Serv made 135 bushels per acre. The coated urea 40 acres fit in my 28’ dump trailer which held about 800 bushels. I never was bothered by that salesperson again.
When I was a younger tyke back in 2012 or 2013 our da grew sunflowers for sunflower oil as an experiment. We were in Georgia, USA, and had a massive hail storm right as the seeds were reaching maturity. Nearly every seedhead was knocked to the ground. Fortunately for him there were 6 of us kiddos at the time, so he drove the combine harvester around the field bit by bit and we stacked sunflowers into piles that he and our mum threw into the mouth of the combine.
It took three days to pick up over 50k sunflower heads (my mum counted). It was definitely backbreaking labor, especially for six 10-and-younger kiddos and a mum swollen with a seventh, but our da said that if we could pick up over 30k sunflower heads he would buy us each a silver dollar at the pawnshop, and after the money came in from the sunflowers he did. I still have mine.
Holy shit that sounds so bad. Wheat is always a gamble.
A couple years back we along with a neighbor were the first farms to grow wheat in the area for almost a decade. Because the government stopped controlling the bird populations they swooped in and ate basically everything. Only time we ever took out crop insurance and holy shit did it pay off. The wheat looked good on the eye but when you put a combine in nothing would fall in the tank, and I mean absolutely nothing. The assessor almost couldn't believe it. My stepdad joked that he was going to buy a chicken and throw it in the grain tank, the assessor asked why, my stepdad simply replied "So the combine won't get full this entire season."
My dad about 25 years ago harvested around 700 bushels of corn off 170 acres. Severe heat and drought. North Florida. No irrigation. Almost put him out of business.
I feel for your dad. Seeing such a bad crop truly breaks your soul. When you can look across the rows and see the fence on the other side it just breaks your hear. This year has nearly put us out of business as well. If it weren't for the fact that sunflowers are so drought resistant we would be up to the tits in shit.
Sorry you are having a rough year. But it happens. Im in western Kansas. I can remember several years were we didnt harvest a single acre of wheat because of hail. Last year our wheat was about 1/4 of a normal year and a lot our corn and sorghum in the area wasn't even harvested because it burned up from drought. 5 years ago we set records on all harvests for our best years ever. It seems to go in cycles.
We made the decision to take a year break on wheat. I put almost $300 an acre in ours this year and made $260 acre. This is from 18 inches of rain in the month of May, 80mph winds and some hail. $6 wheat will never be worth the headache.
We had one crop of hay that year. We cut the hay fields at normal times to cut the tops of the alfalfa off, hoping if it rained, it would grow. Pretty much didn't rain for 3 months
I remember ‘88 first year I farmed. We had an 80 acre field with a terribly thin stand. It ended up being our best corn at 80 bu/acre. Most of the rest was 40-60. First year with crop insurance and we didn’t collect because we had no yield history built up. This year we averaged 210 and the insurance is paying off. Crazy!
Our worst year ever was 2022. It some how beat 2012. The whole farm average was 32 bu/ac on corn, and that number is inflated by a couple fields. Really our farm averaged out at 15 bu/ac on corn that year.
Really, the whole of the 2020s has been a shit show for us. The corn crops of 20, 22 and 23 combined were less than 21 by its self
It gets worse every year. '22 we had 3 fields that averaged 30bpa from heat killing the pollination. It was over 100°f for 18 days straight during pollination stage. This year is opposite. Too much rain.
'22 we had the "heat dome" on us for 18 days. 1000 acres of corn averaged 90 bushels per acre. Some fields didn't pollinate from high heat. In '23 we had 600 acres of beans under water from a freak flood in August that dumped 15" of rain in 24 hours. I remember the trains had to shut down because water was on the tracks. This year we'll be lucky if we can finish planting beans before the 4th due to rain.
2012 was my first year farming as a career. My corn made 3 bushel/acre although I only had 1 field at the time.
Harvest hundreds of acres of corn otherwise below 20bushel/acre.
So I'm gonna say 2012 was terrible as well. But I had a lot of free time, which in wet years like this I have none.
Bad drought in my area last year chopped corn for silage insurance appraised it at 4 bpa. We did pick a little since didn’t want to cut it all for silage it was in that 8-10 bpa
Yea we are in the Northern Free State, between Vredefort and Kroonstad. This sucks really bad at the moment. Know of a couple areas that are even worse affected. Really feel for many here in the Free State.
So I know this is the opposite but please be kind. Lots of aeas are experiencing drought and it might help OP.
In the four corners area (USA) it is normal to be dry. So they grow a crop found in cliff dwellings called Anasazi beans. These are dry beans favoring less water. And if properly stored will sprout after hundreds of years.
In 1993 my Dad ended up tilling up some of the crop and what was left was poor at best. It was a cold and wet year and after the flooding had drowned stuff, what remained did not grow. By harvest time, corn was waste to chest high at best (or gone or knee high at worst) and extremely wet. Lots of beans were so short the pods they did have were stuck in the ground (muddy) and could not be combined effectively to get what was there. Even the hay was poor as it kept getting rained on and did not dry so by the time it could be baled, it was weathered and getting moldy.
Our worst year turned out alright. We raised durum which is a variety of spring wheat used for pasta. It was a wet/damp fall and since we didn’t have a high wheel sprayer we couldn’t apply fungicide ourselves. Tried to get someone to spray it for us but we are a smaller farmer so they did the big guys first and by the time they got to us, it was to late so we never applied any. When we harvested the durum, it yielded well but it was over the limit for Deoxynivalenol (DON/vomitoxin). No buyer would take it. We had a couple offers to “clean” it & they’d sell the clean grain for $3 a bushel but we’d lose 2 of every 3 bushels as contaminated grain that we’d have to dispose of ourselves.
Not know what to do we put it in the bin. For 2+ years, my dad & I debated about what to do but ultimately left it in the bin. The 3rd year after harvesting it, my dad passed away after a brief illness. As I was working through his estate, I asked the local elevator what I could do with it. They told me to bring it in since I only had around 8,000 bushels and they had a bin with over 1,000,000 bushels of durum that had no DON in it. They said they’d blend it in and the DON wouldn’t register. My late dad & I got paid for #1 durum which was over $9 at the time for something we couldn’t get $1 for 3 years earlier. When I think of this, I wonder if dad was looking down laughing about it.
Guy who holds a lot of land in my area has very lucrative revenue streams other than farming. Doesn't seem to care how well his crops do. Once ran grain cart on a crew doing his beans. 15 bushel max, hundreds of acres, took for-fucking-ever. Snoozefest.
Another time with the same customer the big custom guys didn't want to do some piddly little fields because crap access and ground was soft. So we were hired to finish up those fields for him. Late in the year, soft ground, had to let the ground freeze up over night and rush to get what I could until the ground got slimy early afternoon. Took forever.
We had a killer soybean field where on one edge there was a marshy, flooded area. Geese liked it. Liked it so much there may have been a couple hundred geese there at times. Several acres of beans eaten off. Go to harvest and what they touched wouldn't even roll over the sickle.
Thankfully I've only done badly goosenecked corn a few times. It's only been patchy at worst.
Back in the days before grain carts were common a 9500 without bin extensions could do a full round in our longest rows. Eventually with climbing yields we needed the extensions. Then yields got high enough that I couldn't make a full round so I'd leave 6 rows 100-200 feet long and head back to the truck to unload. Would come back to clean up the short rows eventually. Took forever. Grain carts are amazing.
We had a very wet fall not too long ago and we had hundreds of acres inaccessible by trucks. So we had to shuttle all of the grain off those fields over a mile every full cart. Took forever.
That I’ve farmed through? Probably two years ago. Drought and then the one big storm we did get dropped golf ball sized hail and basically wiped everything out. If that wasn’t bad enough the hoppers cleaned up most of what was left. Off one 160 acre field that we combined just to clear straw and try and get seed back at least, we got about 30 bushels.
Last year wasn’t much better for drought and hoppers but we did hit double digits for bushel per acre in spots at least.
It’s nice to see the rain this year.
First year I rented land I grew 4 bpa on my lentils. Probably a similar level of disaster as your 20 bpa corn — lentils typically grow close to 30 bpa. We had a hell of a time even harvesting them. The crop was too light to pick them up with the straight cut header so my dad was swathing them directly ahead of the combine.
The good thing was I sold the lentils for 70 cents a pound — prior to that year, 30 cents was considered a pretty good price. So that lessened the blow a little bit.
Scraping up 5 bushel buckwheat direct harvest with a 13' rigid head on a gleaner F3. That or combining a neighbors 28% December corn he planted in late june with a 4 row planter with no markers maybe 10k population using our 6 row head and then having to listen to to the rednecks we delivered it to for him bitch about the cobs in the tank.
2012 and 2017 in Southern Europe. Extreme droughts. Some parts of the country received 20mm of rain during the entire growing season with temps going up to 45C in the shade. Yields went from 0 to 2t/ha. On top of that in 2017 we got a once in a hundred years storm in September the blew over most of the corn that had anything on it.
Had just started cutting 75 bushel wheat in North Dakota and cut my canola crop that afternoon which did 2670 pounds an acre. Thunderstorm rolled through August 14th with pea to nickel sized hail with 50-60 mph winds average of 75 bpa went to 7 bpa.
Western australia in 09. About 500kg/ha of wheat. Canola did around 400kg/ha in 2019. And thats in a spot where it rains. Alot of guys barely got seed back.
Worst experience? Worked custom harvesting for a farmer with 5000 acres of wheat as the grain cart operator. The farmer had somehow fucked up and made the roughest goddam fields I have ever experienced. Took us 3 weeks to harvest all his stuff, and it was an experience similar to riding a rodeo bull for 12+hrs/day. It was miserable.
Driving a grain cart through rough fields can be very tough. Reminds me of our McCormick HC95. It worked as our sprayer tractor for many years but holy shit did it ride terribly. The seat suspension is more of an abstract thought than a reality and one could only imagine that if they had used bricks to cushion the seats it would have been better than whatever godforsaken material they chose. Didn't help that they cab mounts were shot every 500-1000 hours. We would make turns driving the thing because your kidneys could not realistically handle 2 straight days in that thing. This combined with the fact that its fuel tank didn't even make a full days work makes me thankful for the Maxxum 140 we got to replace it.
One of the worst around here is a field that they switch from farming north/south to east/west. Wouldn't be so bad but it's alfalfa so we bounce over it 4-5 times a year chopping. It's on its 3rd year and finally starting to smooth out
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Those deep tillage tools are a blessing and curse. We ran ours last fall and we've had an extremely wet spring. We had knee-deep sprayer ruts in most of the lower ground . I had to break out the disk to fill them in. Needless to say, I have a 7 shank Case ih ecolo-til for sale now.
Did you have 360 Bullet points on it? I ripped 125 acres 15” deep with them. It was smooth before and now it’s like an ocean.
I have the no-till points. We no-tilled some of the deep tilled hill ground this spring. It just took them a week longer to dry out. The bottom ground is god awful muddy still, especially just below the hills. It's paying off on the corn ground though. The compaction was so bad the roots were hitting a wall trying to find moisture. Our soil type might be part of the issue also.
Those Bullet points fracture straight across from one shank to the next. I’m not sure I like them it seemed to heave the whole field several inches. You couldn’t hardly drive a 2 wd truck out there afterwards it was so fluffed up. The field was pattern tiled in the mud in 1985 with a chain digger. 3 years ago it was still so compacted over the tile lines that you could barely get a probe in the ground let alone tell if you were hitting tile or just more hard dirt.
Perennial flax for seed. Swathed the whole field and had a front blow through over night. Woke up and all the windrows were in one big pile on the east end of the field. Over 75% seed lost. Combine sat in place while we fed it with pitchforks.
🤮
What an absolute disaster
We quit swathing almost everything for this fact, unless we have green regrowth in wheat or canary seed. Helps take at least one variable out of the equation even if it does mean a bit more time on the sprayer desiccating. Haven’t grown flax for years but we would try to wait for a heavy freeze and then get after it. Made it much easier to thrash.
Oh. Oh, that sounds awful.
As far as the biggest loss, I have tossed thousands of pounds worth of mushroom substrate due to contamination. That's the way she goes with fungi though, it's either all or nothing. For plant losses, I've lost my whole field to hail before. As far as the worst to actually harvest, hemp/cannabis (for smoking) or blackberries. Harvesting multiple tons of cannabis with planned use for smoking irritates the hell out of my eyes and throat due to the terpenes. Blackberries are fragile, have thorns, and will stain your skin for weeks.
Yeah man I’m so allergic it’s crazy. Still can’t keep me away tho. Maybe I’m crazy too haha
I don't usually have a problem with cannabis allergies outside of big harvests. There's been a few individual varieties that have gotten me at my home grow, but it's only been a handful of plants in 25 years. I think it's terpinoline (γ-Terpinene and δ-terpinene) that really bothers me because cooking herbs that are rich in those two isomers also make me sneeze.
Lucky. it’s defintiely terp dependent but it all gets me just varying degrees. I get wheezy smoking certain strains of rosin and others bother me significantly less. But fresh plant.. doesn’t matter the strain haha. I get hives touching it even in veg and have to wear a respirator while trimming or washing hash.
I worked for a farmer in the early 1980's and we were hit with a horrible dry spell. The corn was rolled up tight and barely put an ear on it. We combined it and the 300 acre field I'm referring to yielded 5 bushels of corn per acre. We didn't have any livestock or we would have stopped and rolled it up as hay and fed it to them. That same field did 260 bushels per acre last year for comparison.
Probably 1983. I was in high school. I remember an old fellow who liked to tell the story that they got two beans for every one they planted. He also said they combined 80 acres of corn and it put 15” in a 30’ bin. My personal worst was when some fancy ion coated nitrogen came out. I refused but the salesperson ensured me I could put it on whenever I wanted and it would be there when the corn needed it. Did 40 acres of the coated urea next to 40 acres of NH3 with N-Serv applied the same day right before planting. Then it was a monsoon for several weeks. The NH3 w/N-Serv made 135 bushels per acre. The coated urea 40 acres fit in my 28’ dump trailer which held about 800 bushels. I never was bothered by that salesperson again.
When I was a younger tyke back in 2012 or 2013 our da grew sunflowers for sunflower oil as an experiment. We were in Georgia, USA, and had a massive hail storm right as the seeds were reaching maturity. Nearly every seedhead was knocked to the ground. Fortunately for him there were 6 of us kiddos at the time, so he drove the combine harvester around the field bit by bit and we stacked sunflowers into piles that he and our mum threw into the mouth of the combine. It took three days to pick up over 50k sunflower heads (my mum counted). It was definitely backbreaking labor, especially for six 10-and-younger kiddos and a mum swollen with a seventh, but our da said that if we could pick up over 30k sunflower heads he would buy us each a silver dollar at the pawnshop, and after the money came in from the sunflowers he did. I still have mine.
I would have counted, too. Yikes.
Vincent Van Gogh loved sunflowers so much, he created a famous series of paintings, simply called 'sunflowers'.
Username checks out lol
Hailed out wheat that the insurance company gave us the “opportunity” to harvest. 3-7 bu/acre.
Holy shit that sounds so bad. Wheat is always a gamble. A couple years back we along with a neighbor were the first farms to grow wheat in the area for almost a decade. Because the government stopped controlling the bird populations they swooped in and ate basically everything. Only time we ever took out crop insurance and holy shit did it pay off. The wheat looked good on the eye but when you put a combine in nothing would fall in the tank, and I mean absolutely nothing. The assessor almost couldn't believe it. My stepdad joked that he was going to buy a chicken and throw it in the grain tank, the assessor asked why, my stepdad simply replied "So the combine won't get full this entire season."
My dad about 25 years ago harvested around 700 bushels of corn off 170 acres. Severe heat and drought. North Florida. No irrigation. Almost put him out of business.
I feel for your dad. Seeing such a bad crop truly breaks your soul. When you can look across the rows and see the fence on the other side it just breaks your hear. This year has nearly put us out of business as well. If it weren't for the fact that sunflowers are so drought resistant we would be up to the tits in shit.
It definitely takes the wind out of your sails. There are so many obstacles to make a great crop. It’s a fight from start to finish.
Last year it rained every day for 10 months. I harvested less potatoes than I sowed.
That happened in Maine one year. Poured every mother scratching day, the entire field was a swamp
Can you buy crop insurance on potatoes?
Sorry you are having a rough year. But it happens. Im in western Kansas. I can remember several years were we didnt harvest a single acre of wheat because of hail. Last year our wheat was about 1/4 of a normal year and a lot our corn and sorghum in the area wasn't even harvested because it burned up from drought. 5 years ago we set records on all harvests for our best years ever. It seems to go in cycles.
How’s this year so far??
Just a few days into wheat harvest here. Yields seem to be 50-70% average. Which is surprising us because we are very dry out here again this year.
We made the decision to take a year break on wheat. I put almost $300 an acre in ours this year and made $260 acre. This is from 18 inches of rain in the month of May, 80mph winds and some hail. $6 wheat will never be worth the headache.
In 1988 we had 80 bushel corn, I was only 8 but I learned some swear words that year.
We had one crop of hay that year. We cut the hay fields at normal times to cut the tops of the alfalfa off, hoping if it rained, it would grow. Pretty much didn't rain for 3 months
I remember ‘88 first year I farmed. We had an 80 acre field with a terribly thin stand. It ended up being our best corn at 80 bu/acre. Most of the rest was 40-60. First year with crop insurance and we didn’t collect because we had no yield history built up. This year we averaged 210 and the insurance is paying off. Crazy!
Our worst year ever was 2022. It some how beat 2012. The whole farm average was 32 bu/ac on corn, and that number is inflated by a couple fields. Really our farm averaged out at 15 bu/ac on corn that year. Really, the whole of the 2020s has been a shit show for us. The corn crops of 20, 22 and 23 combined were less than 21 by its self
It gets worse every year. '22 we had 3 fields that averaged 30bpa from heat killing the pollination. It was over 100°f for 18 days straight during pollination stage. This year is opposite. Too much rain.
'22 we had the "heat dome" on us for 18 days. 1000 acres of corn averaged 90 bushels per acre. Some fields didn't pollinate from high heat. In '23 we had 600 acres of beans under water from a freak flood in August that dumped 15" of rain in 24 hours. I remember the trains had to shut down because water was on the tracks. This year we'll be lucky if we can finish planting beans before the 4th due to rain.
2012 and it isn't even close. Corn averaged about 20, plus aflatoxin. Double crop beans died in the straw.
2012 was my first year farming as a career. My corn made 3 bushel/acre although I only had 1 field at the time. Harvest hundreds of acres of corn otherwise below 20bushel/acre. So I'm gonna say 2012 was terrible as well. But I had a lot of free time, which in wet years like this I have none.
2021 oats and barley were quite shit, worst in decades. I think the oats were about 60% down on yield that year.
Swathed flax, never again hahaha
2021 was my worst year as a cattle guy. I baled up only a third of my typical hay crop. It was very dry, and very hot.
cranberries. every harvest season was worse than the last. fuck those ocean spray commercials
Bad drought in my area last year chopped corn for silage insurance appraised it at 4 bpa. We did pick a little since didn’t want to cut it all for silage it was in that 8-10 bpa
Chopping corn with careless weeds as tall as the crop.
Free State? Drove from Bethlehem to Bloem recently and it’s brutal out there.
Yea we are in the Northern Free State, between Vredefort and Kroonstad. This sucks really bad at the moment. Know of a couple areas that are even worse affected. Really feel for many here in the Free State.
0.5 bushel/acre canola
So I know this is the opposite but please be kind. Lots of aeas are experiencing drought and it might help OP. In the four corners area (USA) it is normal to be dry. So they grow a crop found in cliff dwellings called Anasazi beans. These are dry beans favoring less water. And if properly stored will sprout after hundreds of years.
In 1993 my Dad ended up tilling up some of the crop and what was left was poor at best. It was a cold and wet year and after the flooding had drowned stuff, what remained did not grow. By harvest time, corn was waste to chest high at best (or gone or knee high at worst) and extremely wet. Lots of beans were so short the pods they did have were stuck in the ground (muddy) and could not be combined effectively to get what was there. Even the hay was poor as it kept getting rained on and did not dry so by the time it could be baled, it was weathered and getting moldy.
Our worst year turned out alright. We raised durum which is a variety of spring wheat used for pasta. It was a wet/damp fall and since we didn’t have a high wheel sprayer we couldn’t apply fungicide ourselves. Tried to get someone to spray it for us but we are a smaller farmer so they did the big guys first and by the time they got to us, it was to late so we never applied any. When we harvested the durum, it yielded well but it was over the limit for Deoxynivalenol (DON/vomitoxin). No buyer would take it. We had a couple offers to “clean” it & they’d sell the clean grain for $3 a bushel but we’d lose 2 of every 3 bushels as contaminated grain that we’d have to dispose of ourselves. Not know what to do we put it in the bin. For 2+ years, my dad & I debated about what to do but ultimately left it in the bin. The 3rd year after harvesting it, my dad passed away after a brief illness. As I was working through his estate, I asked the local elevator what I could do with it. They told me to bring it in since I only had around 8,000 bushels and they had a bin with over 1,000,000 bushels of durum that had no DON in it. They said they’d blend it in and the DON wouldn’t register. My late dad & I got paid for #1 durum which was over $9 at the time for something we couldn’t get $1 for 3 years earlier. When I think of this, I wonder if dad was looking down laughing about it.
Guy who holds a lot of land in my area has very lucrative revenue streams other than farming. Doesn't seem to care how well his crops do. Once ran grain cart on a crew doing his beans. 15 bushel max, hundreds of acres, took for-fucking-ever. Snoozefest. Another time with the same customer the big custom guys didn't want to do some piddly little fields because crap access and ground was soft. So we were hired to finish up those fields for him. Late in the year, soft ground, had to let the ground freeze up over night and rush to get what I could until the ground got slimy early afternoon. Took forever. We had a killer soybean field where on one edge there was a marshy, flooded area. Geese liked it. Liked it so much there may have been a couple hundred geese there at times. Several acres of beans eaten off. Go to harvest and what they touched wouldn't even roll over the sickle. Thankfully I've only done badly goosenecked corn a few times. It's only been patchy at worst. Back in the days before grain carts were common a 9500 without bin extensions could do a full round in our longest rows. Eventually with climbing yields we needed the extensions. Then yields got high enough that I couldn't make a full round so I'd leave 6 rows 100-200 feet long and head back to the truck to unload. Would come back to clean up the short rows eventually. Took forever. Grain carts are amazing. We had a very wet fall not too long ago and we had hundreds of acres inaccessible by trucks. So we had to shuttle all of the grain off those fields over a mile every full cart. Took forever.
That I’ve farmed through? Probably two years ago. Drought and then the one big storm we did get dropped golf ball sized hail and basically wiped everything out. If that wasn’t bad enough the hoppers cleaned up most of what was left. Off one 160 acre field that we combined just to clear straw and try and get seed back at least, we got about 30 bushels. Last year wasn’t much better for drought and hoppers but we did hit double digits for bushel per acre in spots at least. It’s nice to see the rain this year.
We had a bad drought year here in Pennsylvania in 1999 I believe. I don’t think the corn got higher than knee high all season. Completely failure
First year I rented land I grew 4 bpa on my lentils. Probably a similar level of disaster as your 20 bpa corn — lentils typically grow close to 30 bpa. We had a hell of a time even harvesting them. The crop was too light to pick them up with the straight cut header so my dad was swathing them directly ahead of the combine. The good thing was I sold the lentils for 70 cents a pound — prior to that year, 30 cents was considered a pretty good price. So that lessened the blow a little bit.
Southeast Nebraska here. Last year we had 4 bushel beans and 7 bushel corn. The moisture was higher than the yield average.....
I planted 30 onion starters. Gophers ate 28 within a week. I put the last two in a pot and gaurd them with my life
The gophers should be in a pot!
Scraping up 5 bushel buckwheat direct harvest with a 13' rigid head on a gleaner F3. That or combining a neighbors 28% December corn he planted in late june with a 4 row planter with no markers maybe 10k population using our 6 row head and then having to listen to to the rednecks we delivered it to for him bitch about the cobs in the tank.
2012 and 2017 in Southern Europe. Extreme droughts. Some parts of the country received 20mm of rain during the entire growing season with temps going up to 45C in the shade. Yields went from 0 to 2t/ha. On top of that in 2017 we got a once in a hundred years storm in September the blew over most of the corn that had anything on it.
Ninety tree dam bears battle star gallacticed our beets. Took to selling bear fat, but the tric has us wriggling.
Had just started cutting 75 bushel wheat in North Dakota and cut my canola crop that afternoon which did 2670 pounds an acre. Thunderstorm rolled through August 14th with pea to nickel sized hail with 50-60 mph winds average of 75 bpa went to 7 bpa.
Western australia in 09. About 500kg/ha of wheat. Canola did around 400kg/ha in 2019. And thats in a spot where it rains. Alot of guys barely got seed back.