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| About 5 years ago we planted 150 acres of 15" corn to try. Our CIH dealer was suppose to have a 15" cornhead for us to rent but ended up selling it. Guy that bought it said we could rent it when he was done but we didn't want to wait so shelled it with our 30" head.
Harvesting the 15" corn with a 30" head wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. We did have to slow down aome but not as much as I thought we would have had to. The hardest thing I found was staying on the rows so you didn't leave a row standing at the end of the head ( I did have to go back a few times & get what i missed when I drove too wide). I found I really had to pay attention to that & really wasn't able to spend a lot of time watching the rest of the head.
You will need to run the head so that the dividers are centered so they are pulling a row in from each direction. To do this I found it best to run so the outside row is picking just one row. Seemed when I tried to pick two rows with the outer row was when I got to leaving a standing row when I looked away. Corn will be going everywhich way & you'll feel like you are running in underbrush.
We did have 40 acres that was down pretty bad, almost flat. To my surprise we found that it feed in better than 30" row corn and seldom had to stop or backup, though we did run pretty slow in the down stuff.
As for loss, I don't think it was any worse than in 30" rows. I did several checks of 10'x10' squares behind the combine & very seldom found more than one ear on the ground, even in the down corn.
Only other comment I would make is that I sure wouldn't want to do a lot of acres that way. Not because of problems harvesting it, just because you have to pay so much more attention to what you are doing that by the end of the day you're more tires and my eyeballs felt like they were ready to pop out. | |
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Harvesting 15" corn w/ 30" head
