By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

BUTLER COUNTY, Ohio — Tim Hesselbrock is plodding along at only 1-2 mph to harvest his corn.

“Normally I’d be running three or four miles an hour, if not faster,” he said. “I’m lucky if I’m getting 15 acres combined a day. Fuel costs are going to be terrible.”

The reason for the snail-like pace is the hurricane-force winds that blew through Butler County on Sept. 14 and knocked down much of the corn crop. Hesselbrock’s corn was already in trouble from the drought; since July, rain had occasionally fallen in pockets all around, but not on his fields.

“This is a pretty big setback, especially with the way prices have died and the crop being as short as it is,” he said. “It’s one of those trials and tribulations you’ve got to deal with being in farming,” Dan Martin said of the windstorm. “We were fortunate that nobody got hurt and we didn’t have a lot of damage to buildings.”

On seeing damage to the crop, Martin, Hesselbrock and many other area farmers ordered a corn reel, which costs $3,000-$3,500, and mounts on the back of the corn head of the combine. Typically the combine snaps the ear off the standing stalk, but with downed corn there’s no resistance, so the entire stalk goes through the machine in one big ball.

The reel helps feed the stalk into the auger which takes it into the machine to be thrashed, Martin said.

“The reel paid for itself in the first five acres,” he said. “The corn would not feed in at all. It was just one big massive eight-row-wide mass of cornstalks and ears and everything else just lying on the corn head (of the combine). So, it paid for itself right away because without it we could not get through the field at all.

“The yield was down compared to what it would have been if it would have been standing because obviously, we did not get it all, but we did have pretty decent yields this year considering the dry weather.”

Meanwhile Billy Koch IV and his dad, Bill Koch III, were also looking at flattened fields.

“We ordered our reel Tuesday after the wind, and it showed up a week later,” Billy said. “We were very satisfied.

“We feel we’re getting 98 percent of the corn. You take what you can get and be happy with what you’re getting, because without a reel you wouldn’t be running any of it.”

In other years, before the Koches had a reel, Billy remembered harvesting 20 feet of downed corn by having to stop, get out and unplug the combine head. “After an hour of that you’re kind of tired,” he said. “With the reel there were spots we had to just crawl through, but we didn’t have to get out.”

Interestingly, the Koches found that the corn planted north and south seemed to be standing better, but was not feeding into the combine.

“We feel that we can do a better job by combining it one way, towards the south, so all of our corn planted north and south we’re combining it to the south,” he said. “We’re combining against the way they’re laying. We were saving enough crop that it was worth doing.”

Steve Bartels of The Ohio State University extension said farmers seemed to be harvesting their corn early.

“People wanted to get the corn harvested before the rain came,” he said. “They’re concerned that when the rain comes, if it’s enough to make the corn that is on the ground mold, or even sprout, that’s going to cost them a lot of dollars.”

Harvesting earlier than they normally would is going to increase their costs because the moisture content of the corn was probably higher than it would have been, Bartels said. But that’s not all.
“The corn price has come down again with the financial crisis,” he said. “The price has dropped 50 percent from July to now.”
Hesselbrock said prospects for next spring are also grim. Potash, which cost $380 a ton last year, is now going for $1,000 a ton. Other fertilizers that were $600 a ton are now $1,400 (the year before last, it was $350).

Yet, Hesselbrock said he will “pick it up and try to do it again.”