We haven’t had an official Crop Progress Report in over a month due to the government shutdown, but it sounds like most of you are probably nearing the finish line with harvest. And it’s never too early to start thinking about how to improve for next year. Let’s kick things off with 7 harvest tips from No-Till Innovator Marion Calmer.

“One of the things I do with a pickup truck is drive behind the combine and I want to see what’s coming out of the straw chopper. If you see a lot of yellow, that means the corn head is breaking off a lot of stalks or the stripper plates are too tight or something’s wrong. I would prefer to see a red tint out of the straw chopper than a yellow tint. It tells me I’m mainly sending whole cobs out the back end of the combine.”

“Stripper plate gap. Measure the girth of the stalk and make sure that you never get the stripper plates tighter than the diameter of the stalk.”

“I like finely chopped cornstalks, they decompose fast, they return nutrients, earthworms love them. If I’m in a corn-soybean rotation, when I come back to push the platform down the field cutting my no-till beans, the residue is all chopped up and it flows through the header late at night when it starts getting damp.”

“On a red combine, we can adjust the transport vanes. They’re in the fast position for beans. Slow position for corn. On a green combine, I can’t really regulate that.”

“Concave clearance, I’m just looking to see if I have a couple kernels on a cob, that’s how I adjust. The rotor speed, it’s all about the cracks. The fan speed is about the amount of leaves that are in the grain tank. The sieve settings, run the bottom one wide open.”

Calmer will share more keys to success during the upcoming National No-Tillage Conference. Check out the program and dates at NoTillConference.com.

Watch the full version of this episode of Conservation Ag Update.