From Green to Gold - and Back to Green Again...

  ...That’s one way to summarize what has been happening on our farm lately.  The long hours of the harvest season start to wear on people after we have been at it these many weeks. It means late bedtimes, missed kids’ activities, and looking in a lunchpail and wanting to throw the hundredth cold sandwich of the season right out the window.  It also means trying to have a bit more patience, a bit more understanding and maybe a mangled tongue from biting it more often than you would like. 

With the exception of a couple of days of wet weather, we have been steadily working at the corn harvest.  The moisture of the corn is down in that 16-20% range which makes a quick hit with the dryer running when it is 60 degrees outside pretty easy.  However, with yields averaging around 246 bushels per acre we are running out of storage pretty quickly.  We have tried to mitigate this by bringing some to the elevator and some home to our own storage.  Lines at the local elevator were manageable except for a couple days where the wait was close to two hours.  We also stopped the combines for two days this week to take dry corn out of our bins and store it in grain bags.  This has worked well for us in the past, being able to store grain and then haul it to town sometime this winter.  It is not as ideal as having permanent bin storage but we have yet to find a spare 2M in cash to make it happen.  When we built our current bin set up 10 years ago, it seemed like plenty of storage. But in 10 years, we added acres and also significant bushel per acre and now it is not near enough. 

Right behind the combines there is much work being done as well.  We have the balers going putting up corn stalk bales for bedding, our drill planting cover crops, our strip till rig preparing the soil for next years’ planting and manure being applied.  We are applying our own cattle manure on top of planted cover crop and then strip tilling into that in some fields.  In other fields, swine manure is being knifed in using the same GPS guidance lines as our strip till machine so that we can strip till and then plant in the same strip next spring, placing the seeds right over top of the nutrients from the manure.

Green cover crops in the foreground, combining corn

We are getting to the end of the cover crop planting, usually the 20^th of October unless it looks to be really warm.  Most of what we drilled looks great and the trials we did inter-seeding around the 1^st of September have about 8 inches of green growth. Flying on seed into standing crop worked marginally well but the early inter-seeding in corn at V7 was not very successful.  Another reminder of not a failure, just a success in learning what doesn’t work. 

In addition to the field work, fall calves from Montana arrived this week.  It has been a pleasure working with this same ranching family for several years; going out with our trucks, helping to round them up off the pastures and hauling them home. 

October is a very satisfying month as harvest and new beginnings overlap, tracking production and meaningful planning coincide and gratitude for the past year and hope for the new one exists side by side.

2025 was the 75th harvest that Feikema's have completed in Rock County since Clarence and Ann Feikema moved to this farm in 1950. Represented in this pic are 2nd Generation Bob and Ron Feikema, 3rd Generation Shawn and Mike Feikema, and 4th Generation Cathryn and Maddie Feikema - all harvesting on the same day.