How to Check Corn Yields - #255

per acre divided by 56 is 369 bushels per acre good morning we're back for another day we did have that little bit of rain last night ended up with i think 1800 so a little less than two tenths on top of the uh 1500s 2 10 whatever it was that we got on monday i believe it was um so let's get in there we've almost gotten a half inch it'll help the wheat out that's for sure however it is not enough to keep us out of the fields with this today so we're going to go head back to the field where uh dad quit when he was had that bearing go out yesterday keep working he said there's probably about four hours worth of work left over there we do have other fields that can be done um well it can't be done yet but they're getting close to being able to be done we just gotta get the fertilizer spread on them which i've been working on getting lined up so hopefully that'll happen quickly here but we will see so we work on this for a while dan will probably come take over around lunchtime again like he did yesterday and we'll find something else to do this afternoon all right let's get our auto steer turned on here off we go see how slippery it is today all right keep moving dad did get fair amount done we were over by the woods when uh he took over for me so we've got to get from here over to well the horse pasture over there there's fair amount to do yet it's um it's a little rough back here we got all those tile lines right there right there so we're kind of bouncing across them a little bit but gonna be okay we'll get her leveled up good problem is it's still gonna settle some more over winter so we're gonna feel them again in the spring the food culminator will help we're gonna feel them in the plant and we're gonna feel them when we're combining the corn next year and then we'll probably end up ripping these cornstalks up and uh staying ahead of it from that standpoint uh just trying to keep it leveled up after about the second year after we've tiled and then it's usually pretty good and we don't get it settling anymore so oh well benefits outweigh the uh negative is that a negative it's rough it'll be okay okay well i'm done bouncing over the tile lines back here uh there's that waterway the dad put in i'm kind of getting around that that's what it looks better although i did see dead went and got himself some fertilizer to spread on them to make them grow anyway well unfortunately now i get to bounce over the tile lines that are on that end of the field i'll show you when we get back up there but uh yeah going pretty well we're getting closer see that tree that's where we got to get to i think let's see here yeah so we've got 73-ish acres done and it says we've got 68 to go we do not actually have 68 to go because you see those green darker green cover crops over there and there's some more back over there uh that's already been done that those two pieces of this field were prevent plant last year so they got the uh oats and radish cover crop seeded here a month ago and uh this side where we're at now got the clover so we don't have to do that there's about 40 acres there which means of that 68 that's left we've only got about 28 to actually go so we're getting there here's all the other tie lines running across the rows up in this front corner it's not it's not terrible but it is pretty rough my relief driver is here not too much left basically down to the wedge or just a little bit more than that i guess let's say you're saying it says we got 56 left but we got 40 of that done like i said so about 16 acres take them an hour and a half maybe two hours with all the ingrowns to do good deal guess the uh the wind was sort of severe yesterday blew my sign over blew the stakes right over i don't know if it bent them or what but i have to come off to get it out yeah let them right over my goodness wow oh well we were about done with it anyway my bean plot is pretty well ready to run as soon as it dries out and we get the decent weather that we need we're gonna finish combining the field that we're in and then uh the there's one more that we've got going to wheat that's gotta get done and we'll be heading over this way so hopefully maybe tuesday wednesday next week we'll work on getting this bean plot combine you can really see the difference in some of these varieties height differences the color variation we've got gray beans we've got brown we've got tan tawny they call that light one down there on the other side so lots of different stuff here gonna have some really good information i'm excited to be able to run these off and see how everything compares so things look pretty good corn plot will be a little while yet probably two or three weeks at least before we get into that uh it's going to be a while before we really do any corn around here so those used to be straight i don't know if i should be disappointed in the quality of the metal or super impressed with the plastic on that sign that it didn't break that and it bent those stakes i mean them are not small those are probably three quarter inch at least i don't know how well they'll be they're straightenable okay well uh dad's gonna finish over there so that's good um i don't know what else is going on i doubt i don't think we're gonna be able to combine today although we could go look later but i'm not planning on that i do have a couple of errands that i need to run i'll go get something to eat i gotta pick up a suit from the dry cleaner for the wedding i've got on saturday so i think i'm going to run do those things check in with you guys when i get back well i would say we are not going to get much rain and we are not going to be combining soybeans today widely scattered random showers that pop up like the one that is is going through you know it's raining once this passes i was thinking i might go out and uh try and pull some corn ears and take a look at some of that but we'll see if we get a window or not dad did get done chiseling while i was gone tractor's out there somewhere yeah you can see it the other side of my truck anyway um so we're caught up with the chiseling for right now we've got uh one more wheat field i guess we could go and chisel that one uh fertilizer's already done spread there we put the chicken litter on so that one is done but we do have um a two bean fields that we've already got combined that are uh ready to be chiseled we just need the fertilizer spread and lime spread on one of them as well so i got that stuff all lined up here this morning hopefully they will get that stuff spread weather dependent soon and we can go and uh get that stuff all done too because we need to keep the chisel moving we've got probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 1500 to 2000 acres that's gonna need to be ripped up between uh now and when the ground freezes so we'd like to keep that moving so since i can't do much outside and we can't combine and we can't go chisel because it's raining now i think i'm gonna work on this for a little bit it's the first real chance i've had to do anything so i'm gonna sit here and i'm gonna i'm gonna tear some stuff apart i think we're gonna remove the fuel tank maybe work on the radiator i don't know we'll see what i feel like doing but we're gonna we're gonna take a little bit of stuff apart all right well i think that's as far as i'm gonna go here i did take some of this stuff off but this piece has got to come off to get the manifold off i guess that's an intake and an exhaust manifold but uh i kind of want jack to help me with this and be around while i'm taking stuff apart so he can guide me a little bit so i'm gonna call her there but it stopped raining we're gonna go do some yield checks and some corn so let's grab the gator and head out that is the cleanest my gator windshield has been all summer somebody was doing a little cleaning for me thanks dad okay so we are going to go out here in this corn field this is the first second second cornfield that we planted uh and believe it was april 24th uh is 109 day corn 09a 86 and this is a pretty good farm i expect this to be some of our better corn so we're going to see what it looks like and i'm going to show you how to do yield checks we're going to do a couple of different methods with the same spot same ears or whatever and uh get a pretty good idea of what this corn is going to look like we'll see how close our methods are and then we'll try and remember it and compare it to what the combine says so we're going to walk through here we're going to find a spot that we want to check you're looking for average find the average spot that's the middle of the whole farm pretty hard to do really we should do this in five different places throughout the field and then average all of them so we got a few broken stalks i think that's from the rain yesterday or the wind could be let's see here there's a way to sort of see where your stock integrity is you can pinch them and if they can if you can collapse the stock especially if they break over kind of like that uh you might have some standability issues that one's solid they're they're not yeah some of them this one yeah we're gonna want to get this corn sooner rather than later so all right we're gonna pick this spot right here though and here's what we're gonna do so i brought a tape measure and we need to measure out one one thousandth of an acre we're gonna calculate the yield for that one one thousandth of an acre extrapolate from there so in 30 inch rows one one thousandth of an acre is 17 feet 5 inches right there from the end of our tape measure so what we are going to do is count from 17 feet 5 inches to the end of our tape measure how many harvestable ears they are and so we're going to look at these plants and say harvestable ear or not and uh then we'll count that number up and i'm actually gonna do both these two rows so we really have two one thousandths of an acre and uh it just gives me a little bit more representative sample rather than just counting one row so let's do that first let's count how many years okay so the reason that we counted two rows is because these were very different this side had 34 harvestable ears this side only had 29 and you can see we've got some gaps we also had somewhere this stock here doesn't have an ear on it this year i did not count because it's not really harvestable there is a couple of kernels on it but not enough to count uh there was another one this one here i don't think i counted so we lost some stocks on that side where this one here i don't think there was any that didn't have an ear there is a skip there there was this one stalk back here towards the beginning that that's not a very good ear but it has another one down here so i counted it because it's two halves basically so all right so after that we're gonna pick five random ears and some people will go in and they'll pick like every fifth ear or certain numbers in every spot they'll pick the same ones i kind of just walk through and grab and the idea is to be random and representative and not just do biasedly pick the biggest ears out there because that doesn't do you any good so i'm gonna pick some ears and we'll go from there okay i've got my five ears so we've got our population counts 29 and 34. now everything else we can do back out at the gator and take our tape measure with us all right so now that we have our five representative ears here we're gonna shuck them back and uh count some kernels and do some math all right so these ears here are none too impressive um but nonetheless it is what it is uh that's what happens from the dry weather that we had this summer uh so now we need we need to do is count the kernels on each year we're going to do that by counting how many long each a row is and how many rows around there are and we're going to make notes of those on my paper here we're going to write that down until we got all five of them counted oh okay so here's what we had for ears we had a 31 by 18 32 by 16 28 by 18 33 by 16 and a 35 by 16. so we'll do the math from there figure out how many kernels was on each one of those ears and then we know our population right so we counted the ears and we had a 34 to 29 so if we average those out we come up with 31 and a half i think that's right okay so it was 31 and a half was our average population 31 500 because it was 31.5 ears per 1 1000th of an acre so times 1000 is 31 500 harvestable ears per acre i multiplied out the kernels per ear on all those and took an average we average 532 kernels per ear now if we take 532 times 31.5 we get our kernels per acre basically or kernels per 1 1000th of an acre so that is equal to sixteen thousand seven hundred and seventy now what we have to do is figure out how many kernels are in a bushel and we're gonna guess for right now because i don't have a scale to be able to weigh them with me typically i would use a number of 90 000 so i would figure there are 90 000 kernels of corn per 56 pounds which is what one bushel is so we will take this number and divide it by 90 and we're dividing by 90 because this is 1 1000 of an acre so instead of 90 000 we just divide by 90. we could have multiplied this 532 times 31 500 and then divided by 90 000 or you can multiply it by 31.5 and just divide by 90. same thing so when i do that we come up with this number 186.34 that's what that corn should yield according to this method of calculating yields actually i don't feel too bad about that i think that's probably pretty close these ears are not great but there are a fair number of them uh mean 31.5 is not great the 34 000 on the one side was good the 29 was not so who knows you know like i said you should do this in five places around the different areas of the field to really get a representative sample we may go do one more on the other side but i'm not doing five of them we're gonna go do some other fields as well um and the other factor is what is your kernel size are there really ninety thousand kernels per bushel or are there a hundred thousand kernels per bushel in which case our yield is lower or are there 70 000 or 75 000 kernels per bushel in which case the yield is higher uh those are the variables that are really hard to account for so what we're going to do save these ears we're going to try and keep them separate from all the rest of them that we're going to go pick and then we will take them back and shuck them off the cobs and weigh them and we can weigh them and then we can do an extrapolation using actual weight instead of just kernel counts we could figure out how many kernels per bushel or we could just weigh it and say well there's this many pounds per five years times this many ears per acre divided by 56 corrected for the moisture we'll do a moisture sample as well and that'll give us our bushels per acre as well so we'll do it that way see how close it comes to 186 that'll help us figure out what that kernel size is and maybe be a little bit more accurate so uh but that's a good start so we're gonna drive back out and around and go off the road on the far end of this field find another spot and pick another five years do another count and see what we come up with down there all right well let's walk out here always you'll notice this trail here with run over corn that's from when we sprayed fungicide on this corn with the haggy this was the field that i was riding with them in and when you go through the end rows you run stuff over no way around of it but we'll walk out here a little ways and see what we get for ears and population in this spot in the field looks like it's standing a little better down here for whatever reason so this time i got 31 and 34. so our average is going to be 32.5 now let's go pick some random ears one two three i like to pick some that are up and some that are down just from uh even moisture four five okay i can already tell you that this stuff looks better here i'll be surprised if our calculation does not say over 200 bushels when we get out but we'll see won't we well there's a little more variation in these ears you can see we've got three that are sort of small and two that are really nice uh it'd be interesting to see once we count these up wow so on our first sample this is the first one we had 532.4 kernels per year average 533.2 less than one kernel difference but we did have 32.5 average ears or harvestable ears instead of 31.5 so that will make a difference so let me finish the math well not 200 but 192.5 so a little bit better so all right we're going to take these years back before we go to another field we're going to hand shell them we're going to do a different method of yield check and see how they compare so now we need to shell all these years i brought the first well the second five years in and shell them and then we're gonna weigh them and we're gonna take a moisture test well i'd call it a half a gallon all right so now let's get my scale out sit down here up here somewhere down here baby there we go the old triple beam balance old school we used to use this thing out in the green shed all the time so anyway there we've got it zeroed out and we're gonna dump all this corn in there and we're gonna figure out how much it weighs in grams no less we almost had to split this in two so we're gonna hang a kilo on the end here and hope that our slide works for the rest okay good deal less than 1100 grams 1000 and thirty one a thousand and thirty one grams okay time to do some more math so 1031 grams equals pretty close to 2.27 pounds so we're going to take 2.27 divide that by 5 to give us our average pounds per ear then we're going to multiply it by 32.5 okay well maybe good news maybe not i don't really know yet um but 2.27 divided by 5 is 0.454 pounds per ear average multiply that by 32 500 and we come up with 14 755 pounds of corn per acre divided by 56 pounds in a bushel gives us 263.48 that number is a lot bigger than that number here's the problem though that corn is wet those are wet bushels not dry bushels so we need to figure out the moisture of that corn and correct it back to 15 and a half percent moisture so in order to do that we've got to take it out to our moisture tester but before we go out to the moisture tester and do that we're going to get the other five years and shell them and get to this point on that one as well okay we've got this one all shelled let's weigh it up i feel like it fit in there easier than the last one okay are we under or under a kilo i have to get the 500 out though aren't i dang it okay so we've got a smaller weight hanging there that's the 500 or seven eight okay so it's under 900 under 8 30 under 8 20 eight fifteen eight sixteen eight hundred and sixteen grams quite a bit under a kilo all right do some more math okay well that one worked out it was 1.8 pounds divided by 5 was 0.36 per year times 31.5 was 11 340 pounds per acre or 202.5 wet bushels which is substantially less than the 263 on that sample question is what's the moisture if they're the same there's a huge difference if this one's drier there might not be as much of a difference as you think but we got to take them out to the green shed and we'll go test them all right i'm waiting for the moisture tester to power up while i'm doing that i'm going to show you this briefly here i have in my spreadsheets that we keep our records in a formula that converts wet weight into dry bushels the formula looks like this basically what we're doing is taking the wet weight uh and if it's over 15 and a half we're putting in a conversion factor to uh take the moisture the excess water weight out of it uh with this yeah factor uh it's a formula that i got and have developed with uh somebody from uh michigan state that had used it um and some of their stuff and uh it works but basically so what i did here is i put the weight per acre of our two samples in the 11 340 and the 14 755 and then once we get a moisture on it we'll come over here type that in and let's just say it's 20 and it will convert out our bushels per acre so as soon as this is ready we'll run sample one through okay so we're gonna analyze corn and dump our corn in the top here and we hit the button drawer is empty we'll dump it and wait for it to give us a result oh she's still a little wet 28.3 so we come over here type in 28.3 171.8 that's on the one that we test the kernel counted at 186. so what that tells me is that our kernel size is small and they're they're a little bit on the light side we're not getting 90 000 kernels per bushel we're closer to a hundred thousand or whatever i could do the math and figure it out but that's what it tells me so hopefully as it dries down the the kernel weights will uh well you're not gonna your test weight will get better you're really not gonna pick up more bushels at this point though all right so now we're going to run our second sample through this is the one that uh uh hands kernel counted at 192 and it was 263 wet so we'll see what the moisture is on it and figure that out and just to be clear on that 171.8 i'm not upset by 172 if that's what our corn actually yields like that's right in the range of what i'm expecting so it is what it is but that's not horrible oh this one's even drier that's good that means it's better yielding by quite a bit so we're gonna go down to line two type in twenty five 25.1 233 that's better than the 192. so this one the kernel size is much bigger and to be honest if you look at these two samples you can see that this sample is a lot cleaner and big kernels compared to this one that has a lot of smaller kernels and there's some crappy ones that don't they're a little moldy and stuff so i'm not surprised by that result also shows you the variation and why you got to take multiple samples through the field so now i could average those two out and say well that'd be pretty darn close to 200 about 202 i don't think that field's gonna go 202 but you never know and so we'll see what we end up with but uh those are both promising good numbers 25 is not terrible in moisture it'll dry down some between now and when we get to it so we should be looking at 20 corner so um but yeah that's what we got that's that's how we estimate corn yields as you can tell there is there's it's a science but it's not an exact science there's a lot of guessing to it and a lot of variables and uh it's really hard to pin it down until the combines roll through it so um basically we got numbers anywhere from 171 bushels to 233 bushels and our hand count numbers were both in between that so that's a 60 bushel spread and what the potential yield on that field is or at least in those two spots and you know our numbers like that second sample was 40 bushel difference between the hand count and the weight count the weight should be more accurate than the hand count so that's encouraging that one's better but on the first sample it was uh 15 bushel less doing the weight method in the hand count it's just who knows who knows where it will end up but if you have any questions on this process or comments on that leave them down below and i'll try and answer them one thing you will notice test weight did not play a role in any of that yield calculation and that is because test weight and yield are completely unrelated have nothing to do with each other uh now that said i want it to be good test weight this one was 52.1 that's not great but it's not terrible corn is heavier when it's drier there's less weight in it water weight in it and the corn the starch is denser than the water and so as you bring corn down towards 15 percent moisture the test weight goes up and it gets to be better quality so i'm not surprised that 25 28 corn are not very good test weight that doesn't surprise me at all anyway i am going to run up uh well what time is it it's 5 20. yeah i'm going to go look at two more fields i think i'm going to see if i can't get up and pull at least one sample out of our irrigated field uh just because we can get a weight sample now and it should be fairly accurate i think that corn is black layered so let's go see what we get up there and we've even got the same exact variety up there so it'd be a pretty good comparison of what our water did for us okay i'm up here in our irrigated field and uh i just counted and pulled some ears our population surprisingly in this spot is only 31.5 harvestable ears i planted this thicker so i expected it to be a little higher than that but these ears i can already tell you are much bigger than what we were just in this is that exact same hybrid as what we were just in in that other field only difference is this one got watered all summer i am just going to take these back to the farm and husk them so we're gonna drive down here i've got a different variety out this way we'll stop somewhere grab some more ears of this variety into account all right well the ears there aren't super impressive but there was a lot more of them my two rows that counted 35 and 37 which means there's an average of 36 000 of those per acre that is a good thing that's gonna be really good corn so we'll take these two back i'm to stop at one other field mostly because i want to see how dry it is some earlier maturity corn that was planted early uh maybe some of the first stuff we harvest so well let's go here's that other field i wanted to look at judging by what i'm seeing trying to walk through the end rows we better get to this one early that's right there bend test you push on these stalks and they break over that is not a good thing so yeah get out of these ends here so another effect of the dry weather is that when the corn plants are stressed especially when they're trying to fill these ears out which these ears look nice here uh they will cannibalize themselves the plants will in order to protect their offspring the seeds the kernels and so what ended up happening is the bottom leaves die off and turn brown and then it keeps working its way up the plant and eventually it starts pulling nutrients out of the stalk in order to fill out that ear which is fine the problem is uh then the stalks get weak and you start getting these ones that lean over breaking off not so bad here but like this one's going in you do not want broken stalks makes it very difficult to combine that might not be as bad as the ends were but uh there was a lot of them that were that their one broke it's not terrible out here but uh we don't want to let this stuff stand until october end of october november december that's for sure all right i got my ears i counted we had uh 30 on both sides so we're right at 30 000 harvestable ears out here and we'll take them back get a moisture sample weigh them up do all that all right provided this corn is done growing meaning it's black layered um it's not going to add any more weight to it which means that weighing the kernels and taking moisture is a far more accurate method than counting kernels so i'm not gonna bother counting kernels we're just gonna weigh em oh one other thing i did find when i was uh peeling the husks off of this ear see that see that white stuff we got a little ear mold starting that's not a good sign it was the only one i found in this variety the only one i found overall we'll see when i husk the rest of those but uh i think that's diplodia ear rot and it's caused from moisture inside the ear the husks are on there sort of tight and they don't dry out it's not a good thing usually it's not an issue when we have a dry september we had a dry september so something to keep an eye on though especially with this hybrid this is a new one for me so no good there well something obvious right from the get-go on this is two things one these kernels are packed on there really tight it's hard to get the ears started once you get a few off then they come a little bit easier but these kernels are huge like the first two that we were testing we were saying you know plus or minus 90 000 these ones may be plus or minus 65 000 kernels per bushel uh the fewer kernels promotional the more bushels you will have that's that is a good thing but yeah these are going to add up all right well my pail feels fuller i don't know if they're gonna fit in my cup here we might have to uh try and zero out one of these ice cream buckets yeah it might be a problem all right i got them i think i got them all picked up okay let's weigh this one up and keep in mind this is the second sample that we took up there um there was 36 000 ears per acre in this hybrid oh boy 1303 grams oh man guys okay so this is 10d 21 36 000 303 grams works out to 2.87 pounds divided by five years is over a half a pound per year 0.574 pounds per ear that is 20 664 pounds per acre divided by 56 is 369 bushels per acre wet that's wet and this is wet i bet it's over 30 but oh boy that's some good corn okay well i just got done shelling off that first hybrid that we picked up in the irrigated field it's 0986 it's the same hybrid that our first two samples from our other field were it shelled pretty hard i was breaking a lot of the kernels off almost like it's either really wet and just barely black layered or it hasn't quite black layered yet which i'm kind of surprised by i would have thought it would be black layered some of it was i mean that one there clearly was black layered um but it's wet i could i could literally feel the moisture squeezing out of the kernels as i was pushing them off the cob so uh worse than that one which is 110 day so i don't know it's wet but there is a lot of it here so let's weigh this one up and then we'll go take moisture samples and then we'll come back and do our third one that's from that other field 1534 grams on this one wow wow well i'm surprised how the math worked out on this because of the lower harvestable ear count i did not expect it to yield as much but 1534 grams 3.38 pounds divided by 5 is six seven six pounds per ear twenty one thousand two hundred ninety four pounds per acre at thirty one thousand five hundred that's a three eighty point two five wet bushels the question is how much wetter is it and what are the dry bushels gonna calculate too let's go find out 34.2 on the 109 day that was the the last one that we just did we'll see what this one here this is 110 felt dryer 34.2 still equals 287 i will take it i'll take it every time let's see what this one says 30.7 so we're about four points drier 30.7 we've got to enter in our weight which was oh wait i messed that up okay so the twenty thousand six six four goes in this line 302 302 is good let me get i got to figure out what that weight was on the other one it was not twenty thousand six six four it was 21 294 which makes that 296. so the lighter weight one in terms of gross weight uh actually yields better because it's four points drier three and a half points drier but those are good numbers those are dang good numbers so based on that our irrigation is going to return about 100 bushels per acre of corn it was worth it now i may have been slightly biased in the areas of that irrigated field where i went and picked ears from i did not go to the sand ridges i went to some of the better low ground that i knew was going to be some of the higher yielding stuff so i do not expect that field to average 300 um but i do expect it to be pretty good and there will be places quite a few places that do go over 300 bushels per acre so that's good so i'm gonna do this one last sample this is the 107 day corn from that last field that we stopped at uh i'm really not all that curious what the yield is i'm more curious what the moisture is on it but we're going to go through the process here anyway well this one weighed up pretty good too um calculated out to 251 bushels per acre wet and it's drier than those other ones so what we get moisture but this might be over 200 bushel corn well look at that right about there oh so much for that being drier 33.3 ouch well that makes it 198 which i'm still pretty darn happy with so our five yield checks there i'd be happy if they're all above the low one well not all of them the irrigated ones i won't be but uh yeah that's good i'm happy with those the moistures are a little wetter than i'd like to see this time of year um we might have some dryers in fact i know we have some drier stuff at our farm at berkey um but we've got a couple of weeks to get those things to dry down we need some sunshine and a little heat wouldn't hurt anything all right guys that's it for me tonight um hope you enjoyed that little how-to on checking corn yields and uh yeah wow not bad i'm so far so good i guess um i hope to get back to harvest and beans sometime soon i somehow doubt it's going to be tomorrow uh so we're probably it might be the first of the week before we get another chance because there's more chance of rain on sunday so we'll see stay tuned for that i will be around tomorrow morning we'll probably get the chisel going some more and get some stuff moving around i don't know we'll see i've got to leave though two or three o'clock in the afternoon to head to columbus for the wedding on saturday i will not be here on saturday and uh depending on the weather we'll be back around sunday if we're working i'll be here sunday if not it'll be monday so uh have a great night everybody questions comments leave them down below hit that like and subscribe buttons for me please so you don't miss any of these harvest videos and we'll see you guys tomorrow

Channel: Border View Farms

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Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020