Valley City Times-Record

Processing Corn: Harvest Technology Ever-Evolving

By Chelsey Schaefer VCTR Correspondent

Have you ever watched a threshing crew, at Bonanzaville, Fort Ransom, or any other farm show? The threshing machine (predecessor to a modern-day combine) was stationary, and the material to be separated into grain and straw needed to be brought to it. Bringing in great loose piles of the crop, like wheat, would have meant a huge mess. So, the binder machine was invented.

This machine cut the wheat and bound it into bundles of ten pounds or more wrapped in the middle by a single twine, tied with a knot by the very same knotter design still used today in square balers, both large and small. The machine then kicked off the bundles and dropped them where they lay in the field. According to old farm magazines, the horse-drawn version could harvest about an acre an hour.

But after that, the bundles left in the field had to be picked up and brought to the threshing machine, which separated the grain and straw. The straw was blown into a big pile and the grain was collected from a separate chute on the machine.

Farmers being an enterprising bunch, they took the binder design and modified it. They created a machine that cut a single row of corn and bound it, just like a wheat bundle, and dropped it where it lay in the field.

If farmers wanted to harvest grain, those bundles of corn were stacked in the field and allowed to dry, then run through a stationary machine to remove the ears. Those ears would then be stored in a corn crib, which had plenty of air circulation to allow them to dry further. When the farmer wanted just the grain from the cob, he would remove it from the crib and feed it into a separate stationary machine that would do just that. Rollag had one of those machines on display this year.

However, what about silage? Custom corn silage choppers like Jim McFadgen are busy chopping corn for silage this time of year. Mr. McFadgen has a self-propelled chopping machine that takes in multiple rows at a time,

chops it into pieces mere inches long, and blows it into a waiting truck. The truck, once filled, takes the silage back to a pit, and dumps in its load. A heavy tractor packs down the silage to remove the air from it- the ensiling process doesn’t work with air infiltration. Sometimes, the silage is piled into a bunker instead.

By allowing the wet corn material to ferment, it becomes much more palatable to livestock, and contains much more energy than dry matter.

The process to make silage from corn starts to differ from the process to harvest the grain right after the bundle is dropped in the field.

The corn binder would run, and those corn bundles would be left in the field. The individual bundles were picked up, and brought on a bundle wagon to be fed into a silage chopper. That stationary chopper was made up of mostly a big, heavy fan which is both the chopping and the blowing mechanism: The cornstalks run through that fan, and are blown up into a silo via the doors on the side.

Have you ever been driving through some old farm country, and seen a big, tall, perfectly cylindrical structure? That was once a silo, with a brick construction for the cylindrical part, a metal, rounded roof, and doors spaced down one side. Those doors were covered by a chute, because that’s where the material came out.

To get silage out of a silo, a silage unloader (run by electricity) pushed the material to the center with a blade, where it picked the silage up and blew it out the doors. It would then fall down the chute, and the farmer could feed it as he wished.

That’s pretty different, when we compare it to modern corn chopping outfits!

But history has a progression, and the next machine to be created was a tractor-mounted corn chopper. This unit was all in one, since it would harvest the corn and chop it, right there in the field. Rather than a big fan that blows the silage into a waiting wagon, this machine had a conveyor that dumped into the wagon. Possibly the first one was the Ronning Corn Chopper, which cut one row of corn at a time.

After the Ronning machine style, with a conveyor, the market went to a machine that blew the silage out with a fan.

But the real problem at this stage of the silage-harvesting game is this: What do you do with the newly chopped silage? You have a wagon full of small corn pieces- but you don’t need the silage chopper that blew it into your silo to chop it. However, farmers still used those to get the silage put into the silo.

To store the silage made this way, farmers used wagons with chains running across the bottom (like a manure spreader in operation) or wagons with a conveyor that dropped the silage into a fan to blow it into a silo, and could then be packed by running the silo unloader backwards.

Silos were soon found to be unfavorable, because it’s an extra step that requires good upkeep of a big building. However unfavorable they were, they did make the best quality silage- and some operations, mainly dairies, continue to use silos today. .

Tractors were much more commonplace now, and so two-row corn choppers (still the all-in-one machine that harvests and chops the corn) were pulled behind tractors and blew the silage into waiting trucks. Those that still used silos would take it back to the silo and start that process to store it. However, some farmers were getting away from using silos. Now, instead of unloading into a machine that would take it up and drop it into a silo, trucks would instead dump it into a bunker or pit, and big tractors would pack it. It’s starting to look a little more like a modern corn chopping operation, isn’t it?

The only thing missing between then and Mr. McFadgen’s operation is the self-propelled machine- and that was the eventual next step. Among the first to manufacture those were companies like John Deere or Hesston, who made the Field Queen chopper.

Modern top-of-theline self-propelled silage choppers are made by Claas or John Deere, though there are many different brands and sizes. Modern selfpropelled silage choppers are able to take in more rows than the pullbehind types; taking in three to twelve rows at a single pass across the field. Though the pullbehind choppers are still made today, selfpropelled silage choppers in our area cover more acres than do the pull-behind types because of their greater intake capacity. Pull-behind choppers typically take in only two to three rows at a pass. Both of those types of machines cut the cornstalk from the ground, leaving the stalk its full length. After it moves into the machine, companies have come up with numerous ways to chop the stalk into tiny pieces. One common design is to chop the stalk with a big drum roller that has blades projecting from it. However the machine is designed, after the crop is chopped, it moves eventually into the blower, which is a big fan that blows it out into a waiting truck or wagon. There are a variety of additions to the machine that further conditions the crop after it is cut, like a kernel processor that rolls the grain very thin.

Both self-propelled and pull-behind choppers are versatile machines, though: They can have different heads attached to perform different jobs. Many companies offer a pickup head, to pick up already-cut material laying in a field. That material, like alfalfa, is picked up by the chopper, chopped into small pieces, and blown into waiting wagons. This sort of special head is necessary because the silage chopper cuts corn a few inches above the ground- and that would miss much of the alfalfa.

Self-propelled choppers can also have a disc header put on them, like the Krone XDisc, to cut the material from the ground and chop it immediately afterwards. Small grain crops like triticale, rye, or wheat are common uses for the disc header.

Harvesting feed for livestock looks a little different today than it did back in the pioneer days, but the general process remains the same: Making the best feed for the livestock that our technology allows us to make.

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2021-09-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

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