Wheat Harvest in Kansas

My brother harvested his first wheat crop this summer and finished up right before the 4th of July. It wasn't the first crop on our family's farm, he is now the 4th generation of farmers in the family!

This year was the first year we had our own combine and harvested our own crop. We normally hire what is referred to as a custom grain harvesting crew. They travel from the Southern US to the Northern US following the ripening of the wheat crop to harvest wheat for farmers at a set fee. Farmers call these people, "Custom Cutters." Farmers often hire custom cutters because you don't have to invest in all of the harvest equipment and incur the repair costs that it requires to maintain all of the machinery needed for harvest.

Even though it is still extremely dry in Southwest Kansas, the wheat was better than we had expected. We got a few late freezes in April and May that really set back the wheat and made my dad and brother nervous about the yields.  It was no bumper crop, but it just wasn't as terrible as they had expected.

Want to learn more about harvest? Check out this video from the Peterson Farm Bros!

Want to learn even more about harvest? I thought of some of the vocabulary that we use on the farm and you might find it useful to learn more about these words.

• Yield: this is a term we use to describe how much of a crop we harvest per acre of the crop planted. We usually talk about yield using bushels and acres. Some other countries use tons per hectares. 
• Combine: a piece of machinery specifically used for harvesting grain. It operates to reap, thresh and winnow the plants in order to gather just the grain for transport to the nearest grain elevator, barge or train. Crops that are harvested with a combine are wheat, oats, rye, barley, corn, soybeans and flax.
• Bushel: a bushel is a volume measurement used by farmers to describe an amount of grain. It is equal to 1.244 cubic feet or 32 quarts. 
• Test weight: this is a measure that farmers will use a lot in conversation. It is the measure of the weight of grain in pounds per volume in bushels. Wheat has a standard weight at a specific moisture content and it is 60 pounds per bushel at 13.5% moisture. 

Sometimes we forget that, in agriculture, we have our own lingo. I like to post about that lingo so that you can get a better understanding of what it is we do on a family farm.  Heck, there are even multiple words that all mean "Harvest" and are used with different crops. Many of these terms are regional, but it's interesting to hear people talk about how they all harvest their crops.

Synonyms for Harvest: 

Corn: shell, pick, shuck
Beans: run, cut
Wheat: cut, thresh
Cotton: pick, strip
Silage or Hay: lay down, cut, chop

Enjoy!

Tera

      

I'm An Agronomist

So I'm not really an agronomist but that is the name of a website created by Iowa State University that is dedicated to agronomy education. I found the site while visiting a few friends in Ames, IA this past weekend who had an "I'm An Agronomist" magnet on their fridge. Good advertising, I think.

Anyway, here on Food For Thought, we strive to provide a window into all aspects of agriculture so today I thought an inside look at agronomy would be a change-up.

The motto of I'm An Agronomist is "applying science to fuel and feed our global society" - very catchy and very true. The website addresses issues like bio-energy development, how to confront world hunger and protecting human health. I'm pretty interested in feeding 9 billion people in 50 years so I clicked on the World Hunger link and was pleasantly surprised at the tactics agronomists are using to help solve our world hunger problems:

There are now 854 million undernourished people in our world 820 million in developing countries, 25 million in countries formerly controlled by the Soviet Union, and 9 million in industrialized countries. These numbers reflect the intersection of complex historical, economic and political problems that together have created chronic poverty. The companion to poverty is hunger fed by a lack of access to fertile land and resources to grow food, and /or a lack of sufficient opportunity to generate income to buy food.

The solution to hunger must start from the ground up especially since many of the worlds hungry also live in rural areas. Agronomists use skills and knowledge across the areas of soils, agroecology, climate, crop diversity, and plant breeding to help identify and analyze systemic problems facing the agriculture of an area. Contributing this training to the knowledge and practices of local farmers, in the context of their culture, could generate creative ideas that have the potential to take aim at one of the most unjust and unacceptable problems of our time. In this way, agronomists are, "confronters of world hunger"

I was also interested in the human health portion and after checking out that particular page I learned some nifty info on healthier soybean oils. I'm a supporter of fried chicken, chicken fried steak, fried potatoes, etc - so healthier oils to use while preparing those tasty dishes is relatively important to me.
Neat, huh? I also found a cool podcast link, YouTube videos from ISU's Agronomy Channel and if you're ready to bleed agronomy, red and gold --- several desktop wallpaper themes.

I enjoyed reading more about agronomy and the different technologies utilized in crop production, and I hope you'll give the I'm An Agronomist website a look.

Until next time,
~ Buzzard ~