Harvesting Good Wheat on Steep Hills
I spent Friday afternoon and all day Saturday harvesting wheat for my cousins near Dixie, Washington. Dixie is the town I grew up in until we moved to the big city of Walla Walla when I was in high school. The fields we were harvesting on were about a mile away from the old homestead.
The crops down there this year are what I would call a bumper crop. There is lots of dry land wheat that will do around 135 to 155 bushels per acre.
I was driving a Case IH 2388 with rear wheel assist which I needed several times. This country has lots of areas that are fairly steep. In one draw near the creek, I almost ended up going into the neighbor’s field twice before I was able to get the combine turned around. I was always taught on steep hills to turn the combine down the hill when making a turn, not up the hill. Well, when I made these two turns, there was so much weight on the front end of the combine that the rear wheels were unable to dig into the ground enough to turn the combine so I just went straight for about 50 feet before it finally got enough purchase to finally get the machine to turn.
Another site that I had not seen for a while is a new Case IH 8010 trailing a large baler. It looks like it was going less than one mile per hour and putting out a large bale of straw about every 200 feet or so. It appears there is a good market for this as a feed product since there is some actual wheat mixed in with the straw according to my cousin.
As I have said before, my idea of a vacation is to drive the combine and I really enjoyed my day and half on the machine.
Paul Neiffer is a certified public accountant and business advisor specializing in income taxation, accounting services, and succession planning for farmers and agribusiness processors. Paul is a principal with CliftonLarsonAllen in Walla Walla, Washington, as well as a regular speaker at national conferences and contributor at agweb.com. Raised on a farm in central Washington, he has been immersed in the ag industry his entire life, including the last 30 years professionally. Paul and his wife purchase an 180 acre ranch in 2016 and enjoy keeping it full of animals.
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