I farm with my Dad also, we have 1000 acers and 2 Massey 860 combines... No way we can get to all of it before the wind breaks if off or shells out the grain, or gets snowed down which makes it a real nightmare to deal with, and we also have the green stuff to contend with... Spraying is expensive too, and I have my reservations about spraying any chemical on a crop that's about to be harvested and sold for human consumption, although there are lots who do do that, it's just not for me... So, like you we swath everything..... We mainly grow wheat and Barley....
I am in Saskatchewan. I grow wheat, canola, barley, flax, oats and have fallow (rotation in that order). Just grain farming no livestock. I swath every acre. I don't even own a straight cut header. And have no desire to. My herbicide program is stringent so I still have pretty clean fields. Never had a crop sprout in the swath on me neither.
Growing up on farm in Wisconsin, we almost always straight combined our barley or oats. Sometimes we cut it early and chopped it for feed & put in silos. Usually the new seeding hay (alfalfa/red clover/timothy mix) would be 12-15" high. We would clip the grain crop high and we would get some of the taller hay tops running through, but mostly it was just grain & straw. We would have to rake many rows of straw together to have enough to bale. After that, many times we would then cut the new seeding depending how much time it has to regrow before the first frost in the fall.
nice, we have to cut cut the barley here to, 7500 feet elevation and coors wants the barley really dry. funny how other people think they know better than we do!
How about that wild oat? Do you put up with it or try to get rid of it? Here in Finland we really wan't to get rid of it, it is pain in the ass and spreads like a wildfire if no-one does nothing to it.. There is even rules that everyone has to prevent it.
Non-farmer here, so please excuse my ignorance! Something I don't understand about the dessication process. One benefit of it is supposed to be time/labor saving. But, after you straight cut, you still want the straw, right? So, don't you still have to make a pass after straight cutting to cut/bale the straw?
In Saskatchewan. I grow hard red wheat, canola, barley, flax, oats, and fallow a little to give the land a break (rotation is in that order). I swath every acre and probably always will. I don't have any cattle so all my farmable acres are cropped. I have a lot of high/low areas and pothole sloughs so my hill tops could be ready to combine and the bottom heavy crop is grass green. Too much variance in my opinion to dessicate it even if I wanted to. I do a pretty dedicated pre-burn and in-crop herbicide program and my fields stay pretty clean. There are neighbours that swath everything, some swath nothing, some swath only canola, some swath everything but wheat, and so on. Straight cutting canola is a bit of a fad around here but seems to be losing popularity. I am told that cereals will sprout in the swath but I must be lucky because I have never had that happen to me. My advice to guys in the prairies: don't sell the swather. It worked for grandpa, it worked for dad, and it works for me.
Exactly...and for me to straight combine all my cereals I would need to hire out the big sprayer which this year didnt work at all for the guys around me.
@@Northern_Farmer same here. I have a Flexi Coil 67 sprayer and it's a fairly cheap and reliable sprayer so I have no need for a big high clearance and I hate asking neighbours that have one if they want to do custom spraying for me. They are busy enough as it is with their own stuff and custom guys I don't really trust and they are pretty expensive. How did harvest go for you up north? Was a gong show over here but somehow got it all off. Had to dry everything except my barley because it came off first!
@@oilersridersbluejays It sucked ... all that smoke made it like it was cloudy all the time... The canola was late... and froze... had to dry mostly everything.
@@Northern_Farmer yeah she was a rough one for us. Surprised it yielded what it did. May was very dry, June was a flood, July was hot and wet, August was hot and dry, September was cold and snowy, and October was cold and rainy. Weirdest year I've ever seen. Glad I never sold my dryer lol.
Yeah Roundup or other chemicals used to desiccate a crop isn't cheap, and neither is custom spraying, plus some of the grain inevitably gets flattened out by the sprayer, which is lost grain. It all adds up versus a few gallons of fuel to swath the crop and avoid all that loss and buying chemicals. Like you said drawbacks and benefits to both practices-- if it works for you no need to apologize no matter WHAT you do... Later! OL J R :)
And you run the risk of posioning the seeds to if they are not 30 percent moisture or less... I sprayed my peas this year since they are so low I could use my own sprayer... it wasnt cheap.. 550 dollars for 40 acres...
I watch OLF too. Learned lots from him but I'm confused about 'straight cut' vs 'swathing'. Obviously I'm not a farmer, could explain the differences, Thanks
Straight cutting the crop would involve the combine with the straight cutting header on it.. you just go in and combine it all at once. Swathing is when you cut the crop and the machine puts it into a windrow and the combine has a pick up header... and it picks it up and into the combine... If you watch my video combining till the sun goes down... you can see the pick up header. I dont have any videos of a straight header cause we dont have any.
Oh ok so like OneLonleyFarmer does it. I get it. I guess I was getting confused because you're doin' canola and I'm used to seein' Wes do mulch hay. Thanks for clearin' that up.
Went to college in Fairview Alberta, I remember seeing corn standing in early fall for the cattle to graze on, I don't think it was more than 5 or 6 feet high, unlike the grain corn back home in Ontario where 10 feet is not uncommon. Still, I loved the vast amount of canola while it was in bloom everywhere in midsummer! Canola for our area got devastated by swede midge and club root so not seeing much..
I was thinking you still have to run the sprayer through the field and that takes time, a little fuel and you will knock down some crop, plus roundup isn't free.
that spot wasnt to bad... there are a lot of places where there are to many weeds... they would take forever to dry out.. meanwhile the grain would be dry and the green seeds would make it tough.
I was googling for a while, to find out, that pre-harvest is called swath. Not so popular in Europe - Last time I heard that is done in Soviet union times. Two questions are bugging me for a long time about swathing: How big (aprox %) is yeld loss and does windrow molds at bottom, when rain does it damage?
