Some Hillside Combine Therapy

Paul enjoyed a few hours of hillside combine therapy and provides a few videos

My flight from Denver to Pasco was actually on time (it always pay to leave Denver in the morning before the summer thunderstorms show up).

After landing in Pasco, I got my rental car and headed east to between Waitsburg and Dayton, Washington on Lower Hogeye Road. My cousins operate three Case IH combines,

and I was able to ride for about three hours.

The maximum slope we were on was only about 35 percent. The field did have some much steeper ground that they were going to harvest tomorrow so I was not able to hit the 50+ percent slopes. Bummer!

They started harvest around July 10 and still have at least two weeks of harvest to go. Yields have been very good, about the same as 2022. In this area, many farmers have reached consistent yields of 140-150 bushels per acre and the highest that I heard of was 172 and that might been on hilly ground.

This field had a fair amount of rock on it so the yields are lower, but our yield monitor did show some wheat in the 180 range but not for long.

I am including a few videos. It was fairly dusty so the quality may not be the best, but it gives you some perspective of this type of harvest. The hills you see in the back of the photo above are likely in the 45 percent range and to the left of the combine in front in the background might even exceed 55 percent.

This field is about 8 miles from our previous home in Dayton, Washington. The elevation of the field was about 1,750 feet, but our house was at 2,000 feet and the hill behind our house was almost 3,000 feet of elevation. It was difficult to determine which hill is ours since there is about three ridges in between.

The best therapy is hillside combine therapy. I will get some flat land combine time in this fall when I will operate a JD 780 to cut my corn in Iowa (hope my timing is good). That is fun, but it can be more boring than hillside cutting.