On Friday, Oct. 16, I harvested my corn with the help of local farmer Jim Lensch. He was brave enough to let me operate his combine. Really, it was not too difficult to run. The particular John Deere combine I drove uses a hydrostatic joystick and if you want the combine to move forward, you push the joystick forward and to go back, you move it back - that's it! There are buttons on the joystick to raise and lower the combine head and also to swing the auger out and turn it on. A few more buttons to the side of joystick let you turn the combine on and control the engine speed. You don't need to use your feet. There is a left and right brake pedal for tight turns, but I did not use them at all.

The "points" on the combine head are called snoots. You have to keep the rows between the snoots as you combine. As the stalk goes through the combine head, the ear of corn is broken off and goes into the combine where the kernels are shelled off the cob. The cob goes out the back of the combine and the kernels go into the storage compartment in the combine. When the combine gets too full, you have to unload the corn. I was told the combine I drove can hold about 350 bushels of corn.

Once I was done combining the field, we headed back to the farm to test the moisture content of the corn. To take corn to market, you typically want the corn to have 15% moisture. My corn had 34.9% moisture! What does that mean? It means that the corn is very wet and needs drying in a dryer bin. It takes about 4-5 hours to dry as much corn as I had at that moisture level. If it were 20% moisture to begin with, it would only take about 2 hours to dry it down to 15%.

After factoring in what my corn would weigh after being dried, it was determined that I harvested 639 bushels of corn. That comes out to 213 bushels per acre! This is above average! Jim told me the cool summer was good for growing corn.

Next up? Selling the corn!