Efficiency of todays modern harvest equipment

onpoint

onpoint

Active member
How much do you think this is and will effect the future of our sport?

Today's equipment is leaving less and less missed crop in the field for all types of game birds and animals. Many waterfowlers are saying that birds in many cases now. The birds land and move across a field in a matter of hours in many cases. Then they are gone. Making it tough to set up on for the next day and get any kind of success. Fields use to hold birds for several days, not the case anymore. Not enough waste grain/corn to hold them anymore.

Here's a idea..next time your looking for a place to ask permission to hunt on. You might want to look for the guy with older equipment. More waste grain/corn many times could add up to more birds holding up in the cover of these places.

What's your thoughts on the continued development of the ultra efficient harvesting equipment and it's effects on the future of wintering birds?
 
Clean Fields the New Thing

Clean harvesting equipment is leaving fields, especially corn fields, with little grain and cover. The new corn headers leave each stalk about a foot tall and the chaff chopped and lying flat on the ground. Pheasants may go in the field to feed, but if frightened they will leave with no fluffy chaff to hide in. On the plus side are stripper headers for wheat and millet which leave the whole shaft in the field which somewhat offsets the use of post-harvest herbicide which leaves the stubble weed free. A weedy wheat stubble field is my favorite place to hunt, but they are now few and far between.
 
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Efficiency of the farm equipment over the years has gotten better. This will make us, the hunters become more mobile as the birds will do exactly as you stated. Not sure what to expect with the upland birds, they always seem to find where the best forage is and with weather and wind they will never get all the grain into the combine!!!!! Might be a good time to start a study on this though and in 5 years you will have some valuable information!!!!! Good topic!!
 
cornfields seem to be getting picked cleaner every year, but sorghum/milo is always being knocked down stalk, head and all and makes for a lot of feed in most average fields....trouble is pheasants prefer corn as a high energy feed.
 
Where I live we don't have corn mostly grains wheat being #1. The combines here do leave some grain for the birds to feed on. The stubble is high enough that it offers some fairly good cover for them. So our feeding fields are a good place to go........Bob
 
I don't think that roosters prefer corn over milo or wheat or any other food source, after all they are wild animals that have the drive to eat, live reproduce and repeat.....The farmer that lets me hunt has almost brand new John Deere equipment, BUT he no tills alot of his land thus producing great habitat and a great food source.
 
From the factory it might be capable of being more efficient, but if the farmer isn't digging around behind his combine making sure its set right, they'll still blow a lot out the back. Just today the wife and I drove into town, I commented on how much corn had sprouted in the fields, that it doesn't pay if all they're doing is sowing behind the combine. Several fields had enough sprouting that it looked like they'd been drilled.
 
On our family land I walk out and see corn all over the place all winter long. The combines are more efficient but they still leave a lot of full and partial heads of corn out there, then if the corn is around a mud hole and not cut it is left. I have shot pheasants late in January and still have a crop full of freshly eaten corn or soybean. I have also seen volunteer corn just like the above poster said that looks like it has been drilled.

Rod
 
we use to have great waterfowl hunting in the corn stubble near the refuge. ducks would feed day after day in the same fields. now they land and leave in a half hour or less no grain to keep them in field
 
BritChaser said:
On the plus side are stripper headers for wheat and millet which leave the whole shaft in the field which somewhat offsets the use of post-harvest herbicide which leaves the stubble weed free. A weedy wheat stubble field is my favorite place to hunt, but they are now few and far between.
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Excellent point you bring up about the stripper headers. I only learned of them recently and I'd sure like to hunt a few of those wheat stubble fields that are 24" high. 12" of wheat stubble can be great if you hunt it at the right time of day. I too miss the days of abundant weedy wheat stubble.

I also agree with Kiotehntr that the birds don't necessarily favor one grain a great deal over the other. If anything, I'd say KS birds seem to be thicker in milo than in corn. There is always plenty of milo on the ground too.
 
I was down in the wheat country here today. I wasn't thinking of this thread. But I noticed a lot of the farmers with all their modern equipment were breaking up the stubble. A lot them of were already replanted with winter wheat or some other winter crop. I seen a few of the farmer running multiple pieces of equipment behind the tractor. The fields were and all worked and replanted in one pass over..........Bob
 
Used to be in the Midwest we had lots of what we called 4 bottom farms, creek crossings and size of fields such that all you could use was a 4 row implement. Now 48 foot with roundup ready corn and beans. Ironically the roundup seems to kill everything but the fescue! Can't really blame the farmer, land prices outrageous, along with inputs, ( here around $400.00 per acre for corn with cash rent), pushing millions of dollars of debt. along the way, doesn't leave much for wildlife. Changed pretty darn fast too! Joni Mitchell said "you don't know what you've lost till it's gone". At least winter wheat provides some spring nesting cover, though not ideal. Hard to hunt when those long tailed devils get down and slink of at a run through the green wheat! I keep my sanity, tenuous at it may be, by focusing on covey head quarters for quail, ( 1500 sq. ft. shrubbery plantings), feather edging woodlots, promoting crp-33 and SAFE acres to landowners I know. Getting it back a fractional acre at a time.
 
Lots of cropland is being disked under right behind the combine.
 
mnmthunting said:
Lots of cropland is being disked under right behind the combine.
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This is the trend I'm noticing on the farm my dad works on. What GCB is stating had held true for the past few years, but this year they've gone back to the disc. I guess fuel prices went down so they can afford to disc everything 2 or 3 times. It is flat as a parking lot in most places this year:(
 
This year I scouted for geese around my house for early season hunting. It was the strangest thing thebirds every morning went to the same field a disced under sweet corn field. I went out to it in the middle of the day thinking they wouldn't be there and ended up scaring about a dozen birds off the field. After getting over the frustrating disappointment I looked for what they are eating. I could only find a few cobbs with cernals. Yet every morning they were there. We hunted that field and got a few geese we would have had more but my brother and his friends had itch trigger fingers. I kept telling them they were too far.
A few days ago the farmer called me and said there was about a hundred geese 30 to 40 yards behind his heifer barn. Heres the kicker, I was the one driving the tractor that disced that field down it was also a sweet corn field. They've been in that field every day since. I just got to find some time to get back at it.
 
Continuous Wheat

bobeyerite said:
I was down in the wheat country here today. I wasn't thinking of this thread. But I noticed a lot of the farmers with all their modern equipment were breaking up the stubble. A lot them of were already replanted with winter wheat or some other winter crop. I seen a few of the farmer running multiple pieces of equipment behind the tractor. The fields were and all worked and replanted in one pass over..........Bob
Click to expand...

Many wheat fields on the high plains are wheat farmed contiuously -- no fallow period or rotation, and no huntable habitat come pheasant season.
 
kansasbrittany said:
This is the trend I'm noticing on the farm my dad works on. What GCB is stating had held true for the past few years, but this year they've gone back to the disc. I guess fuel prices went down so they can afford to disc everything 2 or 3 times. It is flat as a parking lot in most places this year:(
Click to expand...

You should see from around Redwood Falls Mn to Worthington. I call it the black desert. Plowed and disced as far as the eye can see. Around Worthington it's the worst. Not even a stitch of grass for a Pheasant to hide in. the whole area is tiled and not a stick of water for a duck to land in. It's really sad, I seen maps of how much wet-lands have been lost. Unreal!!
 
With the price of land and equipment they have to do what they have to do. There still is room for a little conservation in marginal land but this is reality for the future.
 
I think the real problem is that everyone has a different definition of "Sustainability". The guy lloking to go out a get a license, hop in car and go shoot a few birds will define it differently than the land renter trying to get 300 bushel corn.

The big Ag chemical companies like to throw that term out htere in their ads becuase it sounds good but again, they have a different agenda and thus a different definition by default.
 
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