I wish more farmers used stripper headers which leave wheat stubble as nice as it can be for pheasant habitat. The new corn headers are in essence mulching the chaff leaving the field with no place for pheasants to hide and hold.
well it depends on the combine head and what kind of tires they are using.
ive seen older combines with narrow tires keep stalks there.. now everyone has to get double tires and i dont know why, but it pushes the stalk down and leaves nothing standing up.
JD corn head really do beat on the stalks... I like New Holland (if i could afford one), they dont beat as bad, but do have HUGE tires...
we used to corn pick our corn, then grind the corn AND the cob giving a really good feed use.
We got the stripper head bc for a few reasons, we plant millet right after the wheat and when using a regular straight head, it leaves alot of straw behind and the drill cant get the seed down. with the stripper head, it really improved the growth.
However!! you have a battle with for example Wheat and Millet... lets say you combine the wheat and then plant Millet right after, the wheat can tolerate alot of nitrate, millet cant. however the wheat seed that gets kicked off the combine will grow again and that will be a competition with millet and wheat. ive seen fields fight for soil and usually wheat wins bc they can handle nitrate and millet cant. So you have to be careful what you plant bc an average farmer will plant spring wheat, then winter wheat, then corn bc corn will leave ALOT of nitrate in the soil. so planting milo after corn would be tough.. if you plant milo before corn, then you'd have a good grain.
so combine settings is very important on how your fan is set, your screen settings... you have to know how do all this.
now if you plant spring wheat in, and then harvest, its good to use stripper head and leave the straw standing... when then plant winter wheat, those wheat stubs will collect snow and pack it so wheat will get enough water when spring comes.
