How fast can you guys run in corn?

[Sam]

How fast can you guys run in corn? We just bought our first red machine it's an 8120 with a 12 row folding geringhoff head and we've still been adjusting it but my dad was able to cut 6 mph 220-240 bu corn without spitting it out the back...

[CB Sowder]

Sam, we traded up this year to a 9550 and with no rain we can run 25 mph in corn and road gear in beans!

[riley pittman]

How fast is road gear? haha

[Phillip Willaim VanScoy]

how do you run that fast and keep your header together. and get the grain clean and not go all the way through the combine?

[Nick]

How many bushels can you cut in an hour then Sam?

[Clayton Mitchell]

This is what my relatives are doing with a new Case IH and a Geringer header:

6 mph - 5,000 Bu/Hour

http://www.mitchellfarms.com/?p=534

Early in the year I was driving slow in corn because the grain was wet (30%) and wouldn’t slide very fast through the sieves. As the corn got dryer I went from 3mph to 6mph (going well over 5000 bu/hr). But now as the corn has dropped below 15% moisture, the kernels fall off the cob so easily that I have to go 3mph to minimize shelling at the header.

The upshot is that the grain comes out of the combine at perfect quality. There is nothing passing through the tailings return, no noticeable loss through the rotor or over the sieves, and the test weight is over 60 lbs/bu.

[CB Sowder]

road gear is when you can run the whole field and not have to dump the combine! We just didn't get the rain this year andthe yields are down 40 to 60%. We did make silage.

[Adam]

Neighbor runs an 8120 w/ 16 row head, looked like 3-4mph is all he could do in 200+ corn.

[K2]

One thing that has become very apparent this year...

5000 bushel per hour, grain tank of 350 bushels....= 14.2 dumps per hour = dump every 4.2 minutes

5000 bushels per hour = 5.2 semi trailers/hour = Semi every 12 minutes


There are very few places that can keep that pace up for any length of time.

[Adam]

Very evident that local elevators cannot keep up when everyone is going full blast, seen a back up of trucks for 2-3 hours this harvest. All this technology on these big machines, and the places that take the grain are still running at 1950's speeds. Seems infrastructure needs a boost in this area. Unless you have plentiful on farm storage it seems that all this big equipment sits more than it runs waiting for trucks!

[ROD TANGEMAN (Tangeman Farms)]

We run 6 or 6.5 mph in corn on bottom ground when going is good, we filled a 12,000 bushel bin started at 9 in the morning and finished filling it by 1 in the afternoon. We were running a 600 and 900 bushel grain cart 1/2 a mile back and forth to the bin site dumping on the semi.

[Matt Duncan]

We have a JD 9410 & a 9550 with 6-row corn heads and 20 ft platforms in corn that is dry and standing good we run 3-3.5 mph we could go faster but with the ruts and washes in the fields its a good way to tear stuff up and besides if we did go faster the carts and trucks wouldnt be able to keep up. in beans its about the same speed, in the mornings when there tough its about 2.5 mph but when there just right in mid to late afternoon its 3.5 mph and as the sun sets its back to 2.5 I like cutting beans when its colder the frost takes the green out of them and you can cut as soon as the dew/frost is off in the morning to just about as late as you can that wasnt the case this year.

[Michael Lewis]

We have a JD 9600 with a 12 row head and the fastest I went was 2.0 to 2.3. Yield Monitor would start going down if I went over that. Anywhere from 180 to 240 bu corn from 13% to 16% and 57 to 59 test weight. Is this normal for a 12 row head? What were all your settings..concave, cylinder, sieves, fan,?