With more corn down in the field, the job now is to get it picked up and harvested before other issues such as molds set in, says Ken Ferrie, Farm Journal Field Agronomist and owner of Crop-Tech Consulting, Heyworth, Ill.
He offers four recommendations to help you in the process.
1. Rigs like this one are worth their weight in gold, he says. They help feed the corn up and over the snoot and into the auger so you achieve uniform feed.
“A lot of guys are running this combination with the augers on the end to help pull the outside back in,” Ferrie says.
2. Consider what you can do with the gathering chains. With down corn, the feed into the head gets a little bit tougher, and you can’t do a lot with the stripper plates.
“Try to get them as close as you can, but you’re going to have a lot tougher time feeding the down corn in,” Ferrie says.
“One of the things you can do is to time your gathering chains so the lugs are across from each other,” he adds. “We keep them staggered for high efficiency. But when you’re in down corn and running slow, if you keep the lugs across from each other, they’ll help move the product through.”
3. Don’t be too aggressive with ear savers. “You may even have to take your ear savers off, if they’re really stiff, to keep this corn flowing up through here,” Ferrie says.
“Then you still have to match the speed of the head with the combine,” he says. “But in this case, instead of being exactly timed, you want your gathering chains just pulling a little faster than your forward speed so you’re pulling that grain towards the combine head.”
4. The fourth thing you can do is tip the deck plates down a little bit. “So, tip your head just a little bit so the front end of the deck plate is lower than it is normally running,” Ferrie advises. “That’ll help grab the corn closer to the ground and bring it up.”
Ferrie reviews all four points in a brief video here:
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