Harvest Time in Iowa

Harvest 2013 is well underway in Iowa. This past weekend the scene repeated most often involved soybean harvest. Combines are often accompanied by support vehicles, grain bin trucks and wagons. Caravans of these vehicles move slowly on the local roads from fields to storage bins. 

Hay also is harvested on this northeast Iowa farm. Once the forage source is mowed and bundled, the tractor spears the rolled stack for transportation and storage.

Iowa's dry fall has contributed to a smooth harvest. Corn is being combined too but no sightings of active harvests were made today. Clouds of silage rise from fields and resemble fires. Semi trucks rolling along gravel roads send dust up and make the sky look like a field wide fire is underway. Just some of the oddities of grain harvest in the hawkeye state.

Haying Time in Ioway

Don't know if this is the first or third or tenth hay cutting of the 2013 season. Plentiful rains this year created several opportunities for harvesting hay and other forage plantings. What is visible in this photo from south of Lisbon, Iowa is the baled hay, the growth of the next round of hay, knee high corn (dark green) and tall grasses in the field's waterway and in a roadside ditch (foreground.) Last year at this time, fields were so parched that hay was stiff, crunchie and yellow in color. Quite the opposite this year.