Finally Got Corn Harvested

Corns been ready to pick for several weeks but we've been getting rain every few days keeping the field muddy.
We got a light shower early in the week but had a few days of no ran during thanksgiving, cloudy so not good drying weather but at least no rain.
Mounted the picker and went at it Thursday morning and finished up in the dark around 6:00 pm last night, had the wagons unloaded and everything put away by 7:00 before it started raining again at 7:30.
Field was soft enough that I could only load 45-50 bushel of ear corn in a wagon without spinning out and getting stuck, it was easier to just swap wagons than deal with making ruts and pulling everything out of the mud.
My brother and his sons keep the wagons emptied out so everything when pretty smoothly.
The only issues were the stalks were dry and keep breaking off causing the head to plug so I swapped out the aggressive quartz roll for a smooth rubber roll, that pretty much eliminated the plugging problem.
The other issue was about three loads before finishing the 30+ year old blower belt broke so, it's a bit of a job to replace that belt and I didn't think we had time so the last few loads had a fair amount of fodder in the loads, not a big issue since it all gets ground into cow feed.

Didn't take time for pics but here are some from last time, same fields and same equipment, just doesn't show all of the mud on the tires.

How many acres do you ear harvest?

Nice equipment and many do not realize that if they run light they can save a lot of headaches. I remember one year a neighboring farmer complaining about wet
ground while I dumped soybeans into the wagon at the end of each round. He said that was not productive but my field got done while he was waiting around to put on a
bin over flowing showing.

Nice.

Dad and my uncle shared a 2 row mounted picker on an F20 Farmall, they picked ear corn with it onto the 80s on barge boxes.

The kids and wives got a real workout at harvest.

I picked corn with a NI pull type and gravity boxes onto the 2000s seriously, and now do a few loads a year. All by myself, man hitching wagons
gets to be a workout.....

Dad always said the mounted picker was the most miserable thing to get through a wet field, narrow front, all the weight on the back skinny
wheels, then the box behind that tracked a little different but fell into the deep tracks the tractor left.

Then when we picked with the pull behind, it was an extra set of tire tracks where the picker wheels were, so it went a little harder even, but you
had some pins you could pull to get out and get maneuvered more so and a wide front at least.

Paul

Thanks for relating your harvest progress along with the nice pictures. It is interesting.

6 acres this year, 5-10 acres is all we raise per year depending on the size of the fields we plant, don't have enough storage for much more than that. This is all of the row cropping we do, enough corn picked on the ear for cattle feed, mostly creep feed for the calves, no soybeans.
Hoping I can get another crib built in the near future to hold more ear corn to keep up with our increasing cow herd.


Yea it's a lot less work swapping half loaded wagons than pulling a loaded one out of the mud once it's stuck.


I've got a hoist to build one barge wagon and am looking for another, unloading ear corn from a gravity bed is easier than shoveling it off of a flat wagon but it's still a good work out for me.
Ford 601 side mount is all I've ever ran, dad bought one new in 64, still have it but it's completely worn out, the one in the photo is my 2nd. FIL had a NI pull type, didn't like it much, left more shelled corn in the field, took a lot more room to maneuver at the end of the field and seemed to get stuck easier.
It was a lot easier to hook and unhook from, for us once the picker was mounted that tractor was tied up till end of harvest.
Back in the day we had the only picker in the neighborhood and we picked everybody's corn, nowadays we're still the only one in the neighborhood with a picker but we're also the only one that picks ear corn.
We did do some small scale row cropping some years back but haven't had my brother's old 550 Massey out of the barn since corn prices dropped below $4.

Yup just got done in the field Friday after turkey day. The corn has been done for a month now. Beans were the problem not drying then wet fields so cut anyway. The last 110 acres we started about 4:30 Thanksgiving morning and finished up Friday night about 8:00 PM augers cleaned up, combine inside, wagons in sheds, and truck empty in the yard. We got froze ground Thanksgiving so that was the difference for us.
Lots of crop still out yet.