Hi my name is Don Elsbernd and I grew up in Calmar in Winneshiek County. Today, I live just north of Postville in Allamakee, Iowa.
My wife, Trish and I have been married for almost 27 years and we have 3 children. Our oldest just graduated and is teaching on a fullbright scholarship. Our younger daughter and son both attend Iowa State University.
I farm 1200 acres of corn, soybeans, and hay and and I also do a little bit of custom haying. I am a low or no till farmer, so I have little tillage equipment. Three of my brothers and I share harvest equipment and labor to harvest almost 3,000 total row crop acres in the fall. The most important equipment I own is the planter, the sprayer, and the combine. In recent years, I have been working hard to upgrade our drying and on-farm storage.
To get ready for this harvest, we have been doing maintenance on the harvest and grain handling facilities as well as preparing the yield monitoring equipment for the new season. I also like to print planter maps for variety reference and with all the grain coming out of the field in a short amount of time, we have to pay close attention to the storage and transportation logistics.
During a typical day, I get everything lubricated and fueled up and check the dryer functions on the grain bins. If we need to move equipment from one farm to another, we try to get that done early in the morning. Then it is off to harvest. Fortunately, the technology advancements have given us the ability to be more accurate and efficient. For example, we switched from a 6 row corn head to a 12 row corn head, which allows us to harvest more corn in less time, giving us shorter days and more sleep to recover.
This harvest we have the same crew and essentially the same land, so I anticipate the good harvest once again- not a bin buster, but a good crop. I will keep you posted and harvest progresses. - Don
Update 9-29-08
We were able to get out in the field over the weekend and start combining beans. Corn is still a little ways away at this point, but it looks pretty good.
Update 10-6- 08
We continue to harvest soybeans. Heavy dews and light winds at night meant we started late and quit early. We now have about 60% of the soybeans harvested with an average yield of 48 bushels per acre. My 10 year average soybean yield is 51 bushels per acre. This week we would like to finish soybean harvest and the begin corn harvest. The corn is slowly maturing and hopefully by the time we finish soybeans we will be able to start on corn. We would like to leave the corn in the field to dry as long as possible, however if we wait to long, we run the risk of field losses as stalk quality deteriorates or we get into bad weather (snow) at the end of the season. Incidentally, we had 25% of our corn harvested by this time last year.
Update 10-18-06
We finished harvesting soybeans and harvested a little bit of corn between the light rains that occurred last week. We are about finished with the high moisture corn (corn stored wet in airtight structures and fed to cattle). Corn is reaching maturity for the most part and a hard frost now would help speed the drying process in the field. The shorter days and the lack of good drying weather have hindered field drying and moisture levels are running higher then what we would prefer at this time of year. Drying costs will likely be high this year.
