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George: I used to harvest mine as high moisture corn cob meal. Fed 60% of it blended with alfalfa haylage. I started off using a New Holland 890 forage harvester with two row picker head and recutter screens in the harvester, but found that to be rather slow, plus the 1066 was roaring along working very little I switched to a 4 row combine and used the tractor and harvester as a stationary grinder-blower at the silo. Set the combine about same cylinder speed as for wheat, close the concave enough so it breaks the cobs and opened seives just a bit wider than grain corn. Hauled the broken cob and grain corn with self unloading silage wagons behind 656 and 560. One problem we encountered was bridging in the combine holding tank if we let it get full, thus we travelled the wagon alongside combine as soon as it returned. The corn I sold left the field directly from combine, and my customers did their own grinding. We liked the high moisture corn cob meal, made it much faster than grinding cobs at feeding time, and the product created less dust. Prior to that I had only fed whole plant silage corn, thus I never had any experience with pickers. A neighbor did, and I can remember him digging cobs out of the crib at -20 to -30 F in Jan. I looked at that idea and building cribs wide enough for skid steer loader. Figured it would take quite a rugged crib to with stand the loader. Couple that with the fact my winter time dairy operation was very low labor. I milked and fed the 100 cows myself most winters. My summer time help went to harvest saw logs and pulpwood, my best cash crop. That labor situation during winter was probably my single biggest reason for going high moisture. I was able to use the combine for other grain as well. We had a great market for rye in those days, distillers were still making rye whisky out of rye, plus rye straw gave big volumes of bedding, very important with our long winters.
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