Farming Fridays! - The Farmer's Daughter USA

Grain Bin Logistics

And with that little strip of beans right there, we are officially done harvesting soybeans this year!

We actually managed to finish soybeans on this past Monday. It was definitely not a bumper crop year for soybeans. If you recall, the year started late because it was so wet and we had a hard time getting into some of our fields. That resulted in a fall where several of our fields still had green plants when the first freeze happened.

The growing season was a touch too cool this year. The soybeans certainly noticed and it really just wasn’t the best crops we’ve ever had.

A wet fall meant we had to wait a while to get back into those fields to harvest. Oddly enough, if you can believe it, the soybeans dried out fairly quickly after that and were almost too dry before we were able to get in and harvest them. When beans are too dry, the pods have a tendency to pop open and spill the beans. Of course, you don’t want that to happen unless you’re in the process of running them through the combine.

That being said, I thought this week I would show you the logistics of transferring all of those soybeans. As you may recall, the combine picks the soybeans and collects them in the large space behind the cab. The combine driver will then transfer the soybeans through the auger and into either the grain cart or right into the semi-trailer.

In the picture above, mom actually snapped the photo while sitting in the John Deere tractor that pulls our grain cart. We usually use that only when the semi-truck and trailer are not in the field. The cart then gets dumped into the semi-trailer, which runs back and forth either to the granary or to our own grain bins on the farm.

As explained previously, we usually put the soybeans in the grain bins if they need to be dried or if there is some other reason that we are not selling them right away (ie. price).

So it all starts with this wooden makeshift box. In a nutshell, the semi-trailer is backed up to this box and the trailer is lifted up to dump the soybeans (sorry, no picture of the truck…).

The beans fall down into the box which, as you can see, has the end of the auger inside of it. When the auger is turned on and going, those swirly pieces of metal start going around and pull the soybeans toward the top of the box, which is actually a feed for the auger.

This portion of transferring the crop is particularly hazardous and one of the reasons that we have the covering on it in addition to the wooden sides. We used to do this by just dumping the soybeans or corn into a “pit” in the ground which was lined. That required us to sweep the beans or corn into the auger feed. It was extremely dangerous because the auger doesn’t turn off…even if you get caught in it. It was very important not to be wearing any type of loose clothing. Not to mention you didn’t want to lose your balance next to it.

No doubt something could still go wrong here, but this is quite a bit safer. Thank God, nothing has happened!

Now, I can’t even pretend that I completely understand what’s happening in the next picture, but the auger is actually powered by a tractor, which you can see more clearly in the first picture. This is actually one of our older and smaller tractors (no, we aren’t pulling the planter with this one…). This picture is the back of the tractor where the auger hooks up and gets turned. Hence, the reason that if you fall into the auger feed, the tractor will have no idea you’re in there and won’t stop.

The next step is that the soybeans or corn get taken up into the main part of the auger that empties out into the grain bin.

At the top of the grain bin, there is a circle opening (hence the cone shaped roof) where the auger is able to empty the soybeans into the bin.

And I apologize for not getting a picture from the top of the grain bin, but they are a little bit higher off the ground than I like to be!

Finally, I wanted to show you this picture (below) of the underside of the auger. Note that it looks like there are some beans falling through. This little screen is actually on the red part of the auger in the previous picture that feeds into the main part. This is one of the ways the soybeans and corn get filtered from “field junk” (part of plants that slipped through, grasshoppers, etc.) Cracked soybeans and corn will actually fall through that screen into a bin we usually keep there (in this case, as you can see above, we were allowing it to pile on the ground). We have a lot of neighbors that will take that to feed the birds, squirrels, and other animals during the winter.