Moisture Preventing Harvest
|  Video
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| Retha Colclasure |
| 11/17/2009 |
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| Farmers are continuing to make progress with harvest, thanks to warmer, drier weather. But they`re making most of those gains in the dry beans, soybean, and sunflower crops . They`ve only made small gains in the corn harvest. Even though it looks sunny and dry outside, fields can still be wet. And if the moisture content in a crop is too high, farmers can`t harvest, no matter how nice the day is. North Dakota`s farmers are just starting to get into their corn fields. "I like this weather," says Bruce Bailey, a Moffit farmer. "We needed it." Bailey likes this weather for one reason...it`s dry. And he needs his corn fields to dry out so he can start harvesting. Right now, they`re still too wet. "This time of year we`re probably only going to lose a quarter point a day," says Bailey. "At the end of November you`re probably going to lose that." The moisture content is just over 21-percent, a full three points higher than what he likes it to be. It`s dropping slowly, but it will only go so low. "Whatever will be come harvest time, will be," Bailey says. The reason farmers don`t like a lot of moisture in their crops is simple. The people who buy it don`t want it either. "We worry about conditions of the crop, time you can get it moved," says Brian Guderjahn, the Wilton Farmers Union elevator manager. If the crop is too wet when it`s harvested, it can get musty or moldy while sitting in a storage bin. "In this area of the state not a lot of the elevators have dryers so we key on air drying with nature`s air," says Guderjahn. So, since the elevators can`t sell it, if they don`t have a way to dry it, they won`t take it, meaning the only option farmers have with a wet crop is to let it stand and hope it dries out in the field. There is some good news for farmers who had been concerned about mold being found in some corn ears. The mold isn`t as harmful to livestock as farmers had originally feared. While mold can produce toxins that hurt livestock, most of the corn samples tested so far have a nontoxic mold. |
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