How long for grain to dry in the field?

Auckland Blue

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Essex
20% here in Northwest Essex before this belt of rain hit us. now raining fairly hard so nothing doing until tomorrow pm provided we miss the thunderstorms forecast for tomorrow. Lucky here to have all our land within a three mile radius so I can do a quick moisture test easily when I feel the crop has dried a bit. When I hear wheat crackling in the sun and wind I know its worth doing a test. Not heard it do that a lot this year! Difficult for you folk with land spread about here and there when showers hit one farm and miss another. some sort of remote sensing would be good I guess.
 

turbo

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
lincs
Just pee'd down here so won’t be cutting today
image.jpg
 

DRC

Member
19.7% north Shrop’s. puddles on the road in the next village when I drove through.
Will go and look at my oats again after lunch, but they are on fields with know wet spots, so ground conditions will be important .
 

Drillman

Member
Mixed Farmer
20.5 in wheat tested 11.30 am this morning. Been dry and breezy since mid morning yesterday. Going to tidy a small bit up at 4pm.

With weather as it is anything under 17% will be a bonus.
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
There will be an algorithm, but it would rely on accurate input variables. You would need a rain gauge on each block of land, giving readings at 3 hourly intervals by telemetry and possibly a hygrometer but other than that you could rely on publicly available measurements for temp, wind speed etc. You would need to input some kind of time marker for ripeness at a moment in time, say when it got to 30% then sit back and let the algorithm tell you when to go and combine.

Best way is to collect a dataset during one harvest so you can fit curves to the various drying factors then create the algorithm accordingly. Better to do it in this numerical way than try to fit laws of physics.

I did this process in 2017 with the Almet dryer we have here. Now all I do is measure the input moisture and ambient air temp and I can set the half dozen controls to give an output moisture of 14.5% , leave it to it and have a cuppa or do something else, whereas back in the day we wereconstantly on the controls over or under reacting to changes that took 3/4 hour to feed through. It's on a sheet of A4 though, no electronics needed.
 

teslacoils

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
Heads turn to dust now. Glumes open and grain just hanging in, yet it still isn't dropping under seventeen percent. Perhaps it's still clinging to life? Perhaps I should have used the roundup..........
 

kc6475

Member
Location
Notts
Sundance, skyscraper, only the odd bit here and there. I will still home save the seed if it dries up this week
Most of our sundance has gone flat, looked amazing all year so not a happy bunny. is it sprouting any worse than your other varieties, not looked at ours yet will pluck up the courage in the morning and go look. Has it lodged worse than your other varieties, it's the only variety for us that's gone flat, would like to grow it again but fear it's a bit of a risk.
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
Heads turn to dust now. Glumes open and grain just hanging in, yet it still isn't dropping under seventeen percent. Perhaps it's still clinging to life? Perhaps I should have used the roundup..........

It just isn't that hot, dry and sunny with us. Keeps clouding over, humid, even a few spots of rain this morning. To get below 15 it needs to be full sun here.
I have also found that some of my wheat has shrivelled and died early on the sand and it soaks moisture up like blotting paper, unlike properly ripened full grain on better land.
 

Wombat

Member
BASIS
Location
East yorks
Most of our sundance has gone flat, looked amazing all year so not a happy bunny. is it sprouting any worse than your other varieties, not looked at ours yet will pluck up the courage in the morning and go look. Has it lodged worse than your other varieties, it's the only variety for us that's gone flat, would like to grow it again but fear it's a bit of a risk.

The sundance is stood well apart from the odd spots and is yield fab.

The skyscraper just got the same growth reg but with hindsight and the crazy wet June it should have had a bit more
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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