hello welcome to Kate's Ag today I'm here with Rye lysak of Oechsner farms and we're
here in Newfield New York and going to be we're actually in the combine for Corn Harvest
so this is so exciting and thank you so much for taking me along for a ride yeah no problem
could you tell me a little bit about the operation um so grow uh I think right now aiming for
700 Acres of organic food grade grain and our main markets are farmer ground flour in
Trumansburg and then we sell a lot to distilleries and breweries and we grow corn buckwheat winter
wheat spring wheat and clover those are our main crops that is very cool yeah so this
combine is a 9570 STS John Deere very cool so I'm just so excited to be in a combine
again yeah yeah and it looks very similar as well with the different buttons as the
ones I drive but the cool corn header yeah so is this a six row corn header six row corn
header we plant with a six row planter and then we have bigger concaves than we do
yes it is quite a bit different from wheat but I'm excited to learn about it yeah and
well I guess we can see what it looks like to combine in the field all right you turn
the back of the combine then the front and then you rev it up yeah which is because we
have these tiny fields with trees I got to be careful not to swing the back of the combine
into a tree and break the auger oh I never thought of that yeah
no we don't really have any trees yeah and when I first started I I would look at the
end of the snouts and try to line those up between the rows but I've learned that what
you actually want to do just look at the rows and try to line it up with where it's entering
the Gathering chains um and you don't want to be off at all you can see we have a lot
of down corn
and you're hand driving this it's not GPS either which is much more complicated yeah
it's it's more mentally engaging it's a lot of fun too some people have uh sensors that
are on either side of the row and so it just the combine will follow the row but that's
not something we have we do have a yield map here that's recording oh oh I didn't even
notice this computer that's very cool technology do you do you all have that on your farm no
we don't at all actually yeah it's kind of I don't know if we're taking full advantage
of it yet but I guess the idea is we could also use that for variable fertilizer spreading
and we spread chicken manure and we could fertilize lower yielding areas or I guess
I don't know maybe
some people our neighbor has a planter that has variable fertilizer
so when he is applying starter fertilizer as he's planting he can burry that basically
that's very interesting we actually apply the same amount of fertilizer to the whole
field okay yeah um what type of fertilizer do you use uh mainly layer manure that's I
think it's dried a little bit um coming from I think mostly
layer houses in Pennsylvania and then also use a little bit of Chilean nitrate spring
on our feet and then for the corn there's also there's there's a starter fertilizer
mix
and then our other main source of fertility is red clover so this corn uh about red blue
that's very neat oh is it it looks like this was no I um I think this was actually another
Headland pass see how they're in three rows and then there's a gap there
take out just it's kind of hard to tell with GPS where your guest rows are because because
ideally they're planted so well that there's 30 inches between every row including your
guess rows but you really have to be actively paying attention you really do all around
the trees and everything yeah this is just amazing yeah I've never seen anything like
it and what moisture are you harvesting this corn at um see what this is actually lower
than I expected it's been I think up around 21 22 um the combines telling me that this
is
although I'm not sure I think that combine tends to read like one or two points below
so it might be a little higher like 20 percent like for sure and then the grain has to be
dried and then you can put it in the bin yeah and we have some people have continuous dryers
we have a batch dryer um so it's a little slower we have to load about take it out that
tends to be our bottleneck we can combine faster
than we can dry
we can pretty easily fill up every single truck and the weapon wow that's so fascinating
for us we usually harvest wheat around 12 moisture and if it's any higher we'll put
it in just an air bin but we usually don't go over like 15 moisture and it's interesting
what you consider dry as well we've had so many days with rain in it you never see that
in Montana so it's crazy yeah it's all relative I guess we had actually October's been pretty
dry we got
a little bit or rain last night we had a dry year than a wet year I guess last year was
really wet so wet that the wheat was pretty sprouting pre-harvest um
oh my goodness
So it had really low falling numbers that makes it much less
desirable we never have that issue yeah yeah I guess you're lucky in that way that way
yes different problems for different areas and the trees are so close yeah and how fast
you drive in the combine well right now I'm not going as fast as I could be because there's
so
much corn down I'm trying to pick it up
yes
but I think anywhere from 2.5hrs miles an hour to if it's not super high yielding I
can go 3 miles per hour
that's when I usually go as well yeah although I like to go on the fast end of things
exactly that's exactly what my dad said and then sometimes I'll hear on the radio you
can't treat the combines like go-karts speed
although it's much nicer to go slower than dig your header our so that's important
wow look at how flat this is
I wonder I mean sometimes you wonder if like a bear or something just came in there and
knocked it all over or maybe it was just deer but you can see this is really low yielding
or it has been I bet we'll get higher here what are the yields you've been getting this
year right our average I think is 106 right now there are there are good spots in the
fields where we're getting oh no I moved over three rows
three um yeah there are some spots in the field where we're getting 150 160 bushel corn
but around the edges that tends to be a lot lower
and our yields traditionally lower for organic corn I believe they are you might know better
than I do but I think they run a little lower
with the weed pressure then we cultivated this twice then we tried to intercede a brassica
cover crop it's really dry so it didn't take super well. You can see there is some of that
out there
and Oechsner's Farms is really an phenomenal operation regarding their practices to try
and be more sustainable it's been fascinating learning for me yeah it's a lot of fun to
we're always we're always trying to look for new ways to incorporate cover crops and that's
that's always a fun fun process to figure out so this is the last pass of corn now how
many passes would you say you make before your tank fills up
that's a good question it depends on how well it's yielding and how long the field is sometimes
you have a field where you can only make two passes and then you're full
I dumped in the truck when you got here and I haven't since then
so quite a few passes actually
quite a few passes and this is a relatively short field
and this is your first year farming how do you enjoy it oh it's it's loads of fun I worked
on Vegetable Farms the past couple years um and that's pretty fun it can be fun to work
on a team with people and you're you're out there um harvesting veggies and it's a lot
of fun but it's also a lot more physical you're out there in the elements rain or
shine and I just love the equipment equipment is really cool so you're enjoying grain farming
yeah grain farming is a blast
and also you had a cover crop in this field could you talk a little bit about that yeah
um so we seeded that cover crop we broadcast seeded it uh just after our second cultivation
and we're hoping we'd get a really good rain to get it to germinate but we didn't so it's
a little sporadic you can see patches there yeah there's decorating into the field but
much of the field doesn't really have a lot so that was a little bit disappointing it's
honestly better than I expected and I'm curious to see now that the corns off whether that'll
grow
that's really good that and and so the cover crop is meant to kind of replenish nutrients
in the soil and and do you also Harvest this those are purple top turnips turn up yeah
very cool um and we don't Harvest them I mean I've been snacking them when I got off the
combine but but it's just a just a cover crop to yeah hold the soil scavenge nutrients and
then other weeds wouldn't grow on the soil during this time as well yeah that's that's
the hope I think if it got them established maybe if we'd see it a little earlier and
we got in a rain it would have established better and what other type of cover crops
do you have we intercede our uh winter grains with red clover and you can see that's that's
part of our rotation so we're driving over a strip of red clover right now that we didn't
plant we didn't plow it this spring because there was a little bit of Wild Onion which
is a bad weed for us so we just didn't even plow up this script because we didn't want
to spread it around so red clover is like the main course of a cover crop for us for
uh experimenting with some oats and peas before spring wheat It's actually an experiment we're
doing with Matt Ryan's lab we tried buckwheat and sorghum Sudan grass and the oats and peas
and the idea is that in the spring we could no-till our spring wheat into it uh without
doing any tillage we'll see how well that works but that sounds really interesting and
good luck with it thank you thank you and you're probably no-tilling most of yes we're
no-till um there's was something called the Dust Bowl days in Montana a lot of the dirt
in the fields and soil would blow away and we also keep more moisture by leaving the
old wheat stalks in the field we retain more snow we call this The Goose Pond Field um
so you fill your trucks um back to front as well I think I ideally um we kind of generally
the first the first load I just kind of grow in there wherever and then the second that
I kind of spread out I'm not going to fill this truck completely and probably just take
it to the next field
very neat what has been your favorite part about Harvest and learning how to drive combines
so far my favorite part that's a tough question I think it's just a fun mental exercise I
find with other types of work I'm often listening to music or a podcast but with combining I'm
just right there yes there's really nothing like it yeah slowing the combine down to Turtle
speed
well I had a wonderful time thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to ride in the
Columbine with you uh during Corn Harvest this was amazing and thank you so much for
watching make sure to like And subscribe and Oechsner Farms has a wonderful Flour Mill
and bakery and website so I'll leave that all in the description okay bye
thank you
foreign