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 It's 3:00 PM and we're going to harvest our field today. If you look
closely to the left, you'll see that a few rows have already been
harvested. It won't take long to harvest our one acre field!
There are still a lot of leaves on the plants. As I mentioned last
week, a farmer would have used a chemical to dry down the plants so the
field could be harvested. We couldn't do that, so we waited another
week and now we're going to cut our field.
 The back of this head appears to be dry. You can see
the combine pulling in to start harvesting the rows where I'm standing.
 This is the cross section of the head we just looked at. You can see head
moth damage. The head appears to be dry. But, as I break apart
the head material to separate the seeds it's not as dry as I would have
thought it would be. This might cause a problem for the combine to cleanly
thresh the seeds from the head.
 If you will remember, we saw a similar picture back on August 26 which
showed the difference in seed size between seeds from the outside edge and
seeds from the center. At that time we were concerned this seed size
difference might be a yield-limiting problem or maybe it was an odd
chance. Well, it appears this seed size difference is rather
widespread across the field. As you can see, the seeds on the left are from
the center and on the right are the seeds from the outside edge.
There's a difference and this will cause a yield reduction. This
situation was caused by the hot, dry weather we had in July and August.
 Well, enough of this chit-chat, we've got to cut this field or what's
left of it. This is a New Holland combine and it will take about 15
minutes to cut our field even with a 5 or 10 minute coffee break!
 Driving a combine is a unique experience, they don't go very fast, but it
takes plants into the combine by clipping the heads and then it separates the
grain or seeds from the plant materials and you end up with fairly clean
seed. This picture is from inside the combine looking down onto the field.
The tinted glass makes the plants appear to be rather green, huh? Well,
I'm a little disappointed about how our field did. We harvested about 1,000
pounds of seed per acre. Originally, I thought our field might yield about 1,800
to 2,000 pounds per acre. But considering the dry conditions we had
during flowering and early grain filling and the amount of head moth damage,
I guess we should be happy with what we got. We will have to find a
"real" farmer that is harvesting and watch how it's suppose to be
done!
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