Central Ga canola harvest

Haley

Member
What a mess! I finally got to cut some canola with the Fords. Lots of rain at the wrong time and a thin stand made for a LOT of green when it came time to combine.I was really dreading cutting this stuff but it actually cuts very easy.I always like to see clean grain in the hopper but this stuff was very hard to clean up enough to sell. Yields went anywhere from 5 to 30 bpa.I learned real quick that a can of spray foam is your best friend when cutting canola.I have always heard that if it water will leak out so will canola and I believe it! I bet I used ten cans of foam and three rolls of duct tape to seal up all the little holes on the Fords just to hold it in.This was my first time seeing canola grow and harvesting it and now I know why we don't see it more often in our area. The guy that grew this probably lost his butt and in my opinion would have been much better off with a wheat crop instead.
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Canola has really begun to become popular in our area in west Tennessee. Any of the guys I know that harvest it use a very modern combine with a draper header. I think the returns are better than wheat at this time due to the low price of wheat. Some guys like it because it he residue is much easier to plant second crop beans in than wheat. It also comes off a few days earlier than wheat allowing for an earlier plant date for beans.

I haven't seen any posts from you in a while. How was wheat harvest? How was yield and test weight? Wheat harvest should be in full swing here early next week. My neighbor started today but I'm sure he is taking moisture dockage at the elevator. He just has to be the first one to start. When he starts everybody else knows they can go in five more days. Ha ha ha
 
We are actually right in the middle of wheat harvest now. Yield and test weights are real low compared to the past two years.I am cutting wheat for the same guy that grew the canola.We should be a lot further along with wheat but the canola was about three weeks late coming off and that put us behind on wheat.I actually cut some canola in one field with the Dominator 76 one morning and got on one of the Fords that afternoon to cut wheat. A little drizzle will raise the moistuer on wheat but it hardly affects standing canola at all.Some test weights on wheat have been down in the high 40 range.We are in another drizzly weather pattern now that has us stopped.I am hoping for about a week of sunshine so I can finish up.
 
I guess some of the other benefits of canola is less disease pressure and no fear of bad test weight...

I sure hope our wheat is better. The low yields don't scare me as bad as the vomitoxin and low TW. The elevator will take it off your hands for pennies on the dollar if they can claim either.. We had some serious wet weather in March and early April but dried off for late April and early May. Ours will be iffy but I guess we won't know till we cut some.. It sure had wet feet for a great deal of the growing season..

Best of luck for the remainder of harvest! Who knows? You may come to love canola. ;)
 
Glad to see the olds girls back at work Haley. Having harvested canola my self out of swaths I can confirm how it likes to escape from any little hole... I find that I need to use a lot of air to keep the seed from slugging over the back of the sieves... How is the header working? Is this the one you modified last year?
 
Hey oj, you are exactly right about the air over the sieves.I started off with my book setting which called for low wind blast and it walked way too much out the back. I finally opened the top sieve up about a half inch and turned the fan back up.This is the header that I rebuilt. Hard to believe but this is the third season since I rebuilt it. We had an accident at the beginning this season with this head that had me mad enough that I was ready to kill the guy I was cutting for. My father had just opened up a wheat field cutting the ends and made his first pass through the field. I was servicing up my combine at the edge of the field and he came driving back up pointing to the cutterbar on the head on his combine(keep in mind this is the head I rebuilt). The idiots that sowed the wheat apparently planted wheat right up to an old 6" well casing sticking up about two foot with a concrete pad around it right in the middle of the field. It had no markers on it at all and was rust colored just like wheat. He hit the pipe with my good head running around 5mph. It hit so hard it threw him into the windshield and completely stopped the combine. The pipe actually hit right where I welded one of the new braces under the head for the extended cutterbar. I was very lucky and it only broke two guards,one board on the reel,and four sickle sections.I am a very calm and laid back guy but I was furious.I let the guy know how stupid I thought it was that no one marked the pipe and explained to him that it is hard enough to keep these old machines running without this unnessary breakdown. All in all I was very lucky on this one but the rock that went in the feederhouse well thats another story.
 

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