| The 2019 harvest on the Newman field was an overall bust. The excessive rain combined with the poor soil nutrition meant that I basically maintained seed stock, and not much more. Wisconsin No 2 came off on July 29. It was around 14.8% moisture, excellent considering all the weeds I had to run through the combine. By the time it was cleaned I had exactly 250 lbs of trustworthy seed. There were a couple odd bags of "not quite pure" seed for flour, but otherwise it was just those five bags from a planting of 0.7 acre! Aaargh... I took the Vavilov off on the 30th. It was much weedier and did not have any beautiful clear stretches like the WN2 had. Although it was very wet, I put it out on a tarp in the sun and it came down beautifully. After a few hours it was down to 12.1% mc. Straw was baled on August 1, 42 bales worth. The Marquis took forever to dry down enough for harvesting. I probably tested with the combine at least three times. It finally came off on August 5th or so, yielding about eight bags. On August 3, I cleaned out the home test plot, including wheats Progress, Champlaign, Purplestraw, and Early Red Fife. I also harvested the Wisconsin No 5 oats (Swedish Select), which looked amazing.  |
| All the java wheat was harvested by sickle. Although this was just a grow-out year for seed, I'm actually quite excited about it. The java grew better than anything else this year. The projected yield was something like twenty bushels per acre, which for this field and in comparison to other 2019 crops was incredible. |
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| Drying out some seed stock in the sun. Although this is a pain, if the weather is good it will do a great job of drying out wheat. |
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| Swedish Select, AKA Wisconsin No 5 oats. Big, beautiful stalks! |
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| The New Holland baler was a real joy to work on. It did not do a perfect job, but I found good information online and made decent progress on it. I am hopeful it will run very well next year. I baled both straw and hay from the Newman Rd field. |
