Safety should always be at the forefront of your farming operations, and harvest is no different. When operating large equipment such as combines and grain carts, overhead power lines pose an increased risk to farm safety.

With harvest quickly approaching, it’s time to make sure your combine is prepped and ready for the field. This article published in fall of 2020 has some good tips for calibrating your yield monitor to ensure high quality yield data. If you are going to harvest test plots or other strip trials with your combine, there are some additional steps you should consider to ensure high quality data from test plots.

With the recent storms rolling through northern Iowa, many growers are experiencing field conditions similar to those seen across the state after the 2020 derecho. To help ensure a safe and productive harvest, we’ve rounded up some tips and information that were developed after the derecho last fall for harvesting lodged and downed corn. While the damage from recent storms is not as widespread as last August’s derecho, some of the impacts to crops are very similar.

Farmers in Iowa are faced with some new challenges this harvest season after the derecho swept through the state in early August. In this video, Ben Covington and Dr. Matt Darr with ISU Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering share their tips for harvesting downed corn this fall, including ways to stay safe as you harvest a difficult crop. 

When heading into the field for harvest, it’s important to make sure your monitors, sensors and scales are getting accurate numbers. Taking the time to calibrate your combine yield monitor is the first step in making sure you are using high quality yield data to make decisions in your operation.

Safety should be a major concern for all farmers during harvest, but as the season goes on, it can be easy to miss details or neglect safe practices that can put you or others at risk. Here are six simple safety tips to maintain throughout the season to keep yourself and your crew out of harm’s way.

Before working in or around your combine, it’s important to go through proper shutdown and lockout/tagout procedures to ensure safety for yourself and those around you. Refer to this list for a reference on how to safely shutdown your machine, and use these practices every time you perform maintenance on the combine. 

The unprecedented August 10 derecho storm event has caused significant damage to Iowa corn fields. If it’s decided to proceed with harvesting the field for grain, several operational changes may increase performance and productivity of the combine.