Last Thursday evening the crew from Birds Eye Foods in Waseca moved in to harvest my sweet corn. I was out at the farm about ready to head for home when they showed up. It was fun to watch them for a little while. It is amazing how they harvest sweet corn now compared to 20 or 30 years ago. Back then there were two row-mounted pickers on 50- to 70-horsepower tractors. Small dump carts were pulled behind the tractors where the sweet corn was collected.

Today there are self-propelled pickers with eight-row heads on them. They still pull a dump cart but the one behind the picker today holds 8 tons. There is another dump cart pulled by a big tractor that drives along the side of the picker as it moves across the field that holds 12 tons. We call it "side winding." If the field is dry enough, the semi-trucks will "side wind" in the field. Because my field was too wet to get the trucks into the field, the dump carts loaded the trucks on the road.

I am never real happy about seeing semi-trucks out in my field because of the compaction they can cause. I was happy to see them loading the trucks on the road. Semi-trucks can haul about 50,000 pounds of sweet corn. When you add the weight of the trucks, they gross over 80,000 pounds. That is a lot of weight going across the field on truck tires. At least the picker, dump carts and tractor have big floatation tires.

On Saturday I received a call from my fieldman that my sweet corn yielded 9.3 tons an acre. That is the best sweet corn crop I have ever grown. It is amazing when you think about it. I planted 24,000 seeds of sweet corn per acre and I had 40 acres. That turned into about 372 tons or 744,000 pounds of sweet corn!

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