Good news - beans dry and yield set records.

Harvesting soybeans in Nebraska

Bad news - corn still super wet.

We planted one field of soybeans on our farm in northeast Nebraska. There were two reasons, I wanted to hay off the cover crop and second I wanted to conduct a few tests to see if I could get beans to hit 50 bushels per acre instead of the 40 bushels we had experiencedand the reason I haven't planted soybeans in 4 or 5 years.

Well the beans did break 50 bushels per acre and actually broke 60 bushels, 20 bushels more than our long term average. But I can't necessarily credit the different technologies because it was probably the cool and wet summer that helped most. And besides everyone else in the area is harvesting 60 bushel beans this fall so that seems to be the local average for the year.

A few points about the harvest (which we will finish this afternoon).

• Soybeans were at 13.3% at 1 pm and by 7 pm dropped to 9.8% moisture
• While beans were dry, stems were wet and tough and we could only combine at 2 to 2.4 mph and sometimes we had to stop for the material to clean through the combine
• The lower parts of the fields yielded the poorest while the hilltops yielded the best, opposite of the normal response
• Yields ranged from the low 30s in the lowest and wettest part of the field to over 80 on top of the plateau (aren't yield monitors wonderful)
• The yield in the bottom was hurt by frost since the top pods did not feel and where whitish in color
• End of day field average was 62.4 bushels for the variety with the first generation Roundup Ready trait
• Today we will knock out 14 acres with the second generation Roundup Ready trait (RR2Y) and since it positioned mostly on top of hill and plateau, it should break 65 bushels.

This is the best bean crop I have even harvested and I attribute the high yield mainly to the weather. I will evaluate the data later to see if my treatments had any beneficial affect.

However being a small farmer, it is much easier to gear up to combine and handle one crop like corn rather than two crops. However I sampled ears in our 105 day variety and it tested 30% yesterday. The driest corn I have. Now I have to prepare to handle super wet corn.