We started harvesting corn soon after the soybeans were delivered or stored away. Again, the harvest of corn went very smoothly, with dry days and long full days to bring it all in for storage. More and more farmers are growing corn to keep up with the world demand. Some farmers have started to move some fields out of their soybean-corn rotation to corn on corn, meaning, they plant corn on the same field they planted corn the year before. This requires some different management decisions to make sure the soil has enough nutrients to grow another crop of corn.

We made it to Iowa just in time to prepare for the 2010 corn and soybean harvest. It was work that I had been used to because for the past seven or so Octobers, I had traveled back to Iowa for a month to help. But for Johnny, it was all new. This past fall was perfect harvest weather. Little rain and many sunny, dry days. Many farmers in the area said that it was the most perfect harvest they had ever worked in their 40-50 year farming careers. That tells the age of the average farmer in these parts, doesn’t it? We harvested soybeans first, as their growing days are shorter and are more susceptible to retaining moisture when it rains and more fragile as they dry. Some of our soybeans were edible soybeans shipped directly to Japan for human consumption. I tried some and they were tasty. Much of them were used to produce tofu.