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Corn harvest starting soon for mid-MO farmer

A farmer in central Missouri says the corn was too high moisture to harvest ahead of the Labor Day weekend.

“It ended up averaging 30% moisture when I did a test run this past week. If we can get it below 25% moisture, we have to get going.”

Nathan Alpers says he’ll try again to harvest this next week what could be one of the best corn crops they’ve ever had on the farm and he’s afraid to wait too long.

“There’s something with that phantom yield loss if you wait for corn,” he says. “You can shell corn at 25% moisture and come back at 18%, you’ll see a loss. Phantom yield loss is real. Once we get the moisture to 21% we can dry it efficiently.”

He says there’s a lot of new crop corn to move this fall and marketing could be a challenge.

“We’ve got a fair amount of the crop we think we can’t hold already contracted. I would guess there would be a lot of no storage bids around as harvest gets in full swing,” says Alpers. “If we can get our crop shelled earlier, get it dried down and cooled out we’ll start hauling it out to keep room at our bin site.”

Alpers raises corn, soybeans and livestock in Cooper County.