As harvest season approaches in Vincennes, Ind., the region brings unique challenges for growers in the area. For Ray McCormick, this is nothing he hasn’t dealt with before. But even with the experience he has, no two seasons are ever exactly the same.

Phantom Yield Loss

This year, one particular issue McCormick is paying close attention to is phantom yield loss. It can be an issue for regions that have a large variance of moisture levels, but McCormick says it’s all about knowing how much moisture is too much and how much is not enough.

McCormick says in his fields, he was always accustomed to harvesting his corn when it was very dry and putting it straight into the bin. But after attending a field day last year and examining some tests that his friend conducted, McCormick began to realize that it may be smarter to harvest corn while it is still at a high moisture level.

“When you're picking pretty dry corn, you can see a lot of dust in front of your head and research has shown that those kernels are turning to where you shell them, they just turned to dust,” McCormick says. “Also, I saw little, tiny chips all over the ground. And it turns out those were these kernels that had died and deteriorated to the point where they just turned to dust when you picked them. So, I believe phantom yield loss comes from deteriorating kernels on the ear.”

Mccormick says he picked a lot of wet corn on his farm last year and while it was a struggle in some regards, because they had to hold it in the bin and dry it for so long, his theory seemed to be validated when he saw his yield numbers.

“When you're picking very wet corn and you're putting it in the bin, even running it through the dryer, you're getting a lot more cracking up with a combine and a lot more cracking up going through the dryer as you’re trying to reduce that moisture out of it,” McCormick says. “But we've never had yields like we had last year. We broke all the records on our farm on field after field after field, and we were picking it wet. We have an old dryer which makes things a little harder, but farmers may want to look into not letting it dry too much in the field and picking some wetter corn and trying it themselves to see if they can't boost yields by picking the corn when it’s wet.”

One of the primary reasons McCormick used to harvest his corn after letting it dry out in the field, is because he didn’t want to use up an excess amount of propane. But he has since realized that propane costs are minimal compared to the money that would be lost to phantom yield loss.

Improving Harvest Efficiency

McCormick learned another trick for making his harvest season go more smoothly and more efficiently when he was at the National No-Tillage Conference listening to a presentation by Alpha, Ill., No-Till Legend Marion Calmer. According to McCormick, Calmer was telling the audience that if their fodder was going through the combine, they weren’t picking corn correctly. Instead, McCormick learned all fodder material should go through the corn head, not the combine.

This idea had been keeping McCormick up at night because he wanted to come up with a way to do everything in one pass with a combine.

“When Marion said the fodder needs to go down through the head, I thought — bingo,” McCormick says. “We’ll run the air tubes right in front of the snapping rollers, that way as everything goes through the snapping roller, it’s mulching on top of the seed.”

McCormick says it worked perfectly. He put it all on a combine during harvest and started out by doing 300 acres to make sure the hoses wouldn’t rip off. After nothing went wrong on those 300 acres, McCormick says he has done the same thing on his corn head ever since and has seen early perfect stands each time. After he saw the success with corn, he wanted to try a similar approach with soybeans, but he knew that he would have to make some adjustments to this unique approach.

Ray McCormick walks through the specs of his 35-foot wide John Deere Draper Platform and Gandy Air Seeders that he uses to seed cover crops while harvesting all in one pass. Mackane Vogel

“On the corn head, you're pulling the fodder through and the seed is spraying out in front of it,” McCormick says. “When you're cutting beans, you can't do that. So we spray it off the back of the platform onto the ground, and then you set your chopper to cover it up with all the material coming out of your chopper because you're running all that bean material through your combine. You want choppers that do a perfect job of covering up the swath. You don't want a platform that's 45-feet wide and you're throwing a 30-foot span of all this valuable residue out of your combine from the beans stubble — and beans stubble is rich in nutrients.

Instead, McCormick says he has a combine that will cock to one side and then to the other side as he turns in order to keep the wind blowing over where he just harvested.

“Having an adequate chopper and residue distribution out of the back of your combine is critical when you're cutting soybeans,” McCormick says.

Coherent Cover Crop Strategies

McCormick’s efficiency doesn’t stop with harvest. He has also figured out a way to effectively seed cover crops while he is combining.

“How many farmers say they couldn’t get all their cover crop done because they just couldn’t get it all drilled,” McCormick says. “That’s not a problem for me. We put it on no matter what the calendar date is. We may change varieties slightly, but it all gets done.”

McCormick adds that he often harvests well into mid-November because in southern Indiana, the weather stays warm for much of the year.

“You get that long harvest of growth and then it hardly even goes dormant anymore,” McCormick says. “Then in February for sure, it's all green and up, which means you have from February-May to grow cover crops, sequester carbon to build your soils, pull nutrients up at the ground level and feed your biology. So really, you have two thirds of the year, and you can capitalize on that every time by putting it on as you combine, because if you get through harvesting, you've got all your cover crop on.”

One factor that McCormick does have to keep in mind because of his unique method of cover crop seeding is seed size. Austrian Winter Peas, for example, are nearly as big as soybean seeds and don’t work as well when they’re thrown on top of the ground. Instead, McCormick says smaller seeds can go a long way.

“We're putting on a pound of turnips when we're going to soybeans, and that's partially because turnips are very small,” McCormick says. “So you're just putting in a little bit of turnips to go 30 or 40 acres. That means that in theory, one bag is going to get you 50 acres at a pound per acre. This year it'll be 9 pounds of annual ryegrass and one pound of turnips. Going to corn, It'll be 11 pounds, 60% of which is annual ryegrass, 20% is crimson clover and 20% is Balansa Clover.”

Equipment Innovations

To make his unique ideas work, McCormick’s equipment needs to be situated correctly to perform the correct way in the field. He uses a 35-foot wide John Deere Draper Platform and a Gandy Air Seeder to accomplish his cover crop goals. The air seeder was made to go on corn heads and is electrically driven.

“It has paddles that spit out the seed electrically so that it’s always at the same rate,” McCormick says. “If you come to a rough spot and slow down, it’ll put on more seed. Or if you start out cutting beans at two and a half miles an hour and end up at four miles an hour, you can slow it down or speed it up as needed.”

McCormick says the machine also has venturis that pick up the seed and are hydraulically driven by a blower mounted near the top of the machine.

“The seed then gets splayed out in a perfect umbrella,” McCormick says. “One of the beauties of putting it on with the head is that you end up with a stand that looks more like grass in your yard than rows of cover crops.”

Because of this uniform stand of cover crops and the accuracy at which the machine puts cover crops on and covers the ground completely, McCormick says each year he has been able to dial back his cover crop seeding rate.

Anytime a grower makes equipment adjustments, there is going to be some trial and error. It’s important to be able to notice any kinks and continue to make adjustments until the machinery runs as intended. One such consideration that McCormick came across was the issue of extra hoses.

“When you’re trying to throw the cover crop off the back, the throat of the feeder house gets in the way,” McCormick says. “If you get back on the frame of the combine and put three of the hoses on the axle frame that are going to blow forward under the feeder house, that gets you around the problem. The rest of them still blow backward so that you’re spreading it uniformly. But you do have to attach those 3 hoses to your platform that go back under the feeder house.”

The chopper is also a key element of McCormick’s system as it plays a vital role in ensuring a uniform spreading of residue.

“We have a 35-footer and a 770 combine and it’s got the power and the chopper to uniformly spread the fodder over the top of the seed,” McCormick says. “Anytime you have a gap out there where it’s not covered in your bean field, there’s a bunch of nutrients that aren’t going to be delivered to that part of the swath because you’re not getting that valuable, nutrient-rich residue back onto that part of the ground.

McCormick says figuring out how to use air seeders on a John Deere Draper has worked out extremely well for him and he can’t imagine doing it a different way now.

“Everyone should have an air seeder either on their combine or on their heads,” McCormick says. “It works great, stops you from having to drill using airplanes, and it's free because as you're going across the field, you're using up the diesel, you're using up the tires, you're using up everything that is needed and you're doing it in one pass. So when you leave the field, you can say ‘I got my cover crop done.’ And then you wake up at five in the morning, it's drizzling rain and you say ‘Great. I got all my cover crop moisturized, so it's all going to come up.’”