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Woodham, Ontario | Might as well do everything in one post.
We prefer shelling the corn for a couple of reasons. First is mold, this year is particularly bad for mold because of the wet weather, with earlage/cobmeal the mold ends up in the feed. When the corn is combined there is usually a lot less mold. Another reason is that we don't really see any value in the rest of the cob, not much nutrients in it. And lastly we don't have room for the rest of the cob. With just the kernels we filled this bunksilo.
We have not always used this setup, but we have used it a few times before. Last year we had a neighbour combine for us and he had a 9610 and a 500 bushel grainbuggy and because the fields were close enough the grainbuggy could actually bring it to the bunksilo to unload into gravity box which fed a rollermill powered by our JD 8120.
This year the logistics of moving the corn from the farm 4 KM away to the homefarm was the biggest reason for using this system. We don't have any equipment to handle it, so we can do different things each year, based on what we need. If we were to truck it home and then grind it, we would have to find someone with trucks with dumpboxes and then scoop all of it up with the payloader dump it into a gravity box and then run it through the mill and then push it into the bunksilo.
This system is a lot more convenient, takes less people, less equipment and there is no mess in the yard!
One person runs the combine, another on the buggy and one person runs the harvester. If you look closely you can see the auger on the harvester is run by the drive for the head and the gate is controlled by the hydraulics on the harvester so the operator can easily control everything. I ran both the JD 7810 and TM190 with the dumptrailers. I would park one under the harvester and make a trip with the other tractor, and then switch them around.
This harvester has been setup for this type of work for now. Claussen Farms own 3 harvesters. This one has a recutter screen installed and different feederrolls for this kind of work. They have a 830 Speedstar setup with a Deere cornhead for cobmeal and their 3rd harvester (830) is still set up for 4th cut alfalfa. They can do whatever we want. Claussen Farms also does all our other chopping..
We're in a cashcrop area, very few self propelled haresters and lots of combines at every dealer.
The moisture was about 28%. We did use innoculant but also because of the potential of mold. Yield on the standing corn we bought as around 140-160. Our own corn was 160-180 on average, that field could use some manure, was showing some deficiencies earlier in the year.
All our crops are in and covered under plastic. Just started feeding the new corn silage today and it looks great. All we have left to do is spread some manure and plow.
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High moisture corn combining, grinding and packing!
