Morning guys, Evan here with EZ Custom Ag. At the home farm today, doing a little bit of checking behind the combine, or I guess explaining to you guys about checking behind the combine. A couple days ago I got out my trusty one foot by one foot square here, and just wanted to get down and kind of show you how we check harvest loss.
I already moved the the residue out of the way here for the most part, but as you can see what we’ve got to do here is count the beans, so I’ve got one here. I saw a half over here, let’s see I think I saw another half somewhere. Oh yeah right there. So, we’re going to call this two beans in this square.
So, for harvest loss when you’re actually running your chopper and spreader, and putting the material over the whole area. Four beans equals one bushel. So, if you’ve got four in here, you’re losing one bushel; if you’re losing eight of them in a square foot then that’s two bushel. So on and so forth. So, I try to keep it under a bushel.
Right here, I’m at about a half a bushel. That’s pretty acceptable, especially as dry as they’ve been, so one thing when you’re running really dry beans, it’s not so much a problem in wet beans, but in dry beans, I like to do this same thing right behind the header. That way you can see if they’re shattering out from the reel, or just the sickle shocking them, or anything like that. You can make some adjustments to your header, such as, how fast you’re running the combine, or how fast you’re running your reel. You can slow those down, or speed those up depending on how your shatter loss is. Then also do it behind the combine to see If you’re running some out the back. You know, out the separator, out the chaffer, or over the grates and you can make adjustments there also.
So, just a quick thing I like to do a couple times a day. Carry my handy square here. Pretty simple tasks that can save you a lot of money. Those bushels add up pretty quick. Just jumping out, walking around the combine, checking your loss to make sure that things are at acceptable levels, and you’re not putting that money on the ground after you’ve spent so much time and effort to get this crop to produce. We don’t want to just blow it right back on the ground. Well, I hope this was helpful and thanks for listening guys. We’ll see you next time out in the field.