HUSA Oct 26 2026 - Byron Woodruff

• The conversation is an interview with Byron Woodruff about the farm’s harvest season. This year’s crops included silage corn, lentils, wheat, canola, grain corn, and edible dry beans such as Great Northerns, pintos, and yellows.

• Overall, the early part of harvest went fairly well, but yields for wheat and other grains were lower than hoped, possibly because of light hail earlier in the season. Later, about two to three inches of rain significantly slowed harvest and stretched the season out by roughly three weeks.

• Silage corn harvest was especially difficult because wet field conditions caused trucks to get stuck repeatedly. A tractor had to remain on standby to pull them out, and some low, wet areas of the field were left unharvested, leaving a few acres of corn standing. Similar problems were reported in other nearby silage corn fields.

• Grain corn harvest went more smoothly, with a partner farm completing it in a single day.

• The farm is still relatively new to edible dry bean production, and the speaker described it as a learning process. Equipment issues, machine rebuilds, and the challenge of managing humidity during swathing and combining made bean harvest difficult. They experimented with both a one-step machine and regular swathers, but it was hard to determine whether one method was clearly better than the other.