Kiowa, Kansas: After a week of sitting in Kiowa after arriving, we are finally combining. Five days in, and the wheat is awesome. Averaging anywhere from 50 to 70 bushels per acre, this is a great crop to start out in Kansas.
Here in Kiowa we are running four Case IH 8260’s, and Paul is running an AF10. The AF10 has had a rough start. First, it didn’t want to calibrate the header, next the moisture tester doesn’t want to work, and then it won’t go into road gear so it’ll only do 10 miles per hour moving fields. Luckily most of the fields are close together, so there haven’t been many long moves yet. The machine seems to have a lot of software issues, and Case is trying to get it figured out. It sounds like the machine that Paul is supposed to have, the AF9, is now ready and hopefully when they switch machines out, the AF9 will have less kinks to work out. But it is a great machine and when it wants to cooperate, it runs well.
The weather has been a little bit difficult. The rains have held back, but the humidity is so high, and we have had a lot of cloud cover with barely any wind. Humidity has been running in the 80’s-90’s in the morning, and even now at 3pm it’s still at 49 percent. This makes cutting wheat tough, and we haven’t been able to get going until after lunch. In turn, the wheat gets tough as sun the goes down as well and we haven’t been able to run very late.
As of right now, I believe we will hopefully get wrapped up in the next couple of days. It won’t be a minute too soon as we are already needed up the road in Pratt. Around Pratt they started sampling fields, but I didn’t hear how close it is. It just means we need to wrap up and move. I have a feeling this season may be a game of catch up constantly.
Our crew in Texas left one machine back to finish about 300 acres up, and they have moved one machine to Kingfisher, OK. Hopefully they will get going on that job soon.
Up in Anthony, about thirty minutes northeast of Kiowa, our crew has seen much of the same conditions as we have seen here. It’s slow going, high humidity, but also a great crop. They are seeing 60 to 70 bushel wheat.
We’re so happy for our farmers in Kansas this year that they have a great crop to combine. The drought has finally lifted for the time being, and hopefully weather can keep up for another great crop next year.
