Suck it Soybean

The tumultuous soybean harvest has ended for me. The struggle has been resolved. I'm sure most of you already know this from my incessant ranting and raving on various mediums, specifically in person but soybean is the worst! As a plant it has no final abscission layer or "moisture wall" to stop moisture from returning to a dry seed, corn does. Corn is better. Anyways, the issue I have is that each morning when there is a dew or even worse, a frost, you have to wait hours for that dry then it's further hours for the seed to dry back down to a suitable level for harvest and storage. For any of my readers who didn't grow up working with this crop, which is almost all of you, crops have to dry to a certain moisture for proper storage, handling, processing, etc. For soybean it is 13% moisture in general. Different world areas might have different requirements, I really have no clue. But for here you want to be close to that 13%. If you are too high, then you would have to use a dryer to bring the moisture down. If you are too low then you risk quality issues. Too high and you can have mould and disease develop which cause spoilage and waste. I could go on and on about this stuff but I'm trying to get the point across that you have to get it in a small window. A night where the wind blows all night is a special gift as it means no dew. If it is going to rain the next day or overnight, usually there is no dew. If you are unaware, the dew begins to form as the temperature drops in the evening, usually just after dusk. So getting a couple hours of bonus time in the evening can be a big deal. Usually makes for a later night but if rain is coming you aren't going to be able to go for a day or two anyways so you can recover. This fall, the conditions are such that most days you can't really start harvesting until one or two bells after the noon hour. The sun goes down around seven so you have maybe 5-6 hours a day to get the stuff done. That is not a big window. Factor in travel time for my team to get to sites and that's an 8-10 hour day right there with no time for anything else. Corn on the other hand, you can go mid to late morning and can go pretty much as late as you want. Dew rarely gets up the corn plants so it's less of a concern, there is more frost to contend with but that's not near as much an issue as the dew. Have you learned anything today? Maybe a little added knowledge around the complexity of soybean harvest? Next time you see a product with vegetable oil on the ingredient list remember my rant, the struggle of getting harvest done and appreciate where your food comes from. People seem to have been disconnected from the source of the raw materials that make up what they find on the grocery store shelves. That's a whole other rant though.