It Is What It Is: Corn Harvest 2019

It is what it is.

It's a philosophy of life I suppose I learned at my parents' dinner table. Both my brother and I seem to use it with some regularity. I believe the phrase has been transcribed on a homemade plaque at the family farmstead.

 

That sums up corn harvest, which we completed last week. It wasn't the worst corn harvest we've ever had. It wasn't the best.

It is what it is.

 

In this case, the overall average was 66.6 bushels per acre. The high was 97 bu/acre and the low was 61 bu/acre. (If 66.6 was the average, you can deduce that there was more in the 60-bushel range than the 90s.) We don't have irrigation, so these are dryland crop totals. From what we hear from neighbors and family, our average is fairly consistent with others in our area for dryland fields.

In all honesty, Randy was a little disappointed with the yield. We had a lot of subsoil moisture at the beginning of the growing season. But I guess we just didn't get the rain and cooler temperatures we needed during grain filling. There were fairly large mudholes where no crop grew. As Randy says, "I guess it's Kansas."

How does Corn Harvest 2019 stack up with previous years' averages?
2019 - 66.6 bu/acre
2018 - 82 bu/acre
2017 - 43.6 bu/acre
2016 - 71 bu/acre
2015 43.88 bu/acre
2014 - 108 bu/acre
2013 - 57 bu/acre (This was the first year we added corn into the crop rotation).

When you reach the end of a season, it's always good to look back to where you've been. To read more about each stage, click on the links:

We started planting corn on April 15, 2019, and finished April 25 or so. Wheat has always been our primary crop. However, the prevented planting of wheat acres due to excessive moisture last fall meant an increase to those we devoted to corn on the County Line. The cost of planting corn is appreciably higher than the cost of planting wheat due to seed costs, fertilizer and herbicide. Because we are a totally dryland farm, wheat typically performs better than corn on our acreage. 

We planted 600 acres of corn. To compare: In 2018, we planted 280 acres of corn.

The corn was emerging in early May.

June 21, 2019

By mid-June and the beginning of summer, it was knee high.

As advertised in a song from a musical, the corn was "as high as an elephant's eye" in July. 

July 8, 2019

At least it was high as a farmer's eye.

 

By the end of August, the corn was starting to dry down. It was too dry to take to the feedlot for high-moisture corn and not quite dry enough to haul to the elevator.

Our corn wasn't a bumper crop. But neither was our wheat this year. This is the first time we have more corn bushels to sell than wheat bushels. (We planted 1,080 acres of wheat vs. the 600 of corn. Part of that is the difference in the size of the kernel. Corn kernels are bigger and heavier than wheat kernels. Corn typically produces more bushels per acre than wheat, and that was definitely true this year when we had the poorest wheat harvest we'd had in the 10 years I've been blogging.)

And so we finish up another task on the County Line. 

It is what it is. 

And, as one of my dad's other signs - and sayings - goes, we'll keep on hoeing.

Grinning from Ear to Ear: A Corn Update

The corn is making my wheat farmer grin from ear to ear ... corn pun intended.

While we slog our way through the soggy ground and poor wheat crop toward the end of wheat harvest, Randy can't help but be excited about our dryland corn crop. He has to let his eternal optimist outlook shine somehow!

July 4, 2019

It's not the norm to have a tunnel of corn lining both sides of the road on the trip from our house to the Zenith Road. Corn still is not our primary crop, but prevent planting on wheat acres last fall meant a boost in the corn acres planted this spring.

 

We planted 600 acres of corn last April. That's not much when compared to other farmers, especially those with irrigated acres, but it's significant for us. We also planted 95 acres of milo and 30 acres of silage, doubling our normal row crop acreage.

Because of spring rains, we have our share of mudholes in the corn fields.

But now that the corn is taller, there's the illusion of a mile-long avenue of corn on one side of the road south of our house.

The 1.5 to 2 inches of rain that fell Friday into Saturday arrived at an inopportune time for wheat harvest. But it was an ideal time for corn pollination.

The tassel is the male flower of corn. Each tassel is comprised of a central tassel stalk and lateral branches. As the corn plant tassels, it opens its packets of pollen.

 

At the same time, silky strands become exposed on the lower portion of the plant. The pollen from the top of the plant must reach the silk. In the fields, this is done solely by wind and luck. Once the silk is covered in pollen, each strand will become a kernel of corn, and an ear of corn will start to form.

Corn is monoecious, which means that male and female reproductive structures are present on each plant. However, male and female flowers are in separate locations on the plant. Given the separation of the ear and tassel and considering the vast amounts of pollen transported within a field, it is understandable why corn is primarily cross-pollinated. Less than 5 percent of kernels may be fertilized by pollen from the same plant.

The ear is the female flower of corn. (Randy is pointing an undeveloped ear of corn in the photo above.)

 

Silks develop and elongate from the surface of each ovary on the ear. The silk functions as the stigma and style of the female flower providing a pathway for the male reproductive cells to reach the ovule. Silks begin growing from ovaries at the base of the ear, then progress toward the tip.

Normally, pollination is a continuous process with fertilization occurring gradually along the ear as silks emerge. A mass of long, green silks indicates that pollination has not occurred. Anything that interferes with pollination may reduce fertilization and kernel set.

Successful fertilization does not always result in a harvestable kernel. Even though the corn looks good right now, there's a lot of time until harvest. For several weeks following fertilization, grain quality and quantity can be reduced when photosynthesis is interrupted by cloudy conditions, moisture stress, heat stress and other factors.

But even with those caveats, the crop's current prospects have my farmer happy for the moment.

July 8, 2019

It's good to have something to dream about when it's taking forever to fill a truck with a poor wheat crop and you're backing out of endless mud to avoid getting stuck.