Corn Field Harvesting

| Allison

Hello, dears!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I don’t know if I did because I’m scheduling this post ahead of time, hehe. Anyway, in keeping with late-November themes of gratitude and harvest, I have some neat farm photography for you today. Several weeks ago I drove out to the field my dad and brothers were harvesting and got some lovely shots in the fading light. ❤

Ready for some golden hour photos and farm trivia? 😀

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After I got Dad’s text that they were combining and I could take pictures if I wanted, I drove over to this field at our second property, a few miles away from the main farm we live on. The air looked rather foggy or misty, but mainly it was just dust. 😛 Still, such a lovely glow!

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At any other time of day, cornstalks dry enough to be harvested for grain look rather ugly and dead. But they’re fine at golden hour. 😉

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Ooh, I quite like this photo! It looks like I mirrored it or duplicated it, but nope.

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Hey look, the corn is waving at you guys!

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Aha, we have arrived at the equipment part. Here’s a back view of the combine Dad uses to harvest the corn. It’s incredibly huge in real life, despite its tiny size in this picture.

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The combine feeds dry cornstalks into that spiky header at the front and shells corn kernels off the cob to be harvested and stored in big grain bins back at our main farm until taken to the mill.

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Hehe, here’s Dad waving as he drives by.

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This is what makes all the dust: when my brothers drive alongside the combine with the grain cart to collect the corn as Dad harvests it.

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And then Logan or Jeff, whoever was driving the tractor, unloads the corn into the semi which holds a lot more.

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We harvest thousands of bushels of corn every year. A decent yield is 150+ bushels/acre where we live, and this field was about 60 acres – so they got about 9,000 bushels, or 9 big semi-trailer loads!

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One year at our old farm, where the soil was better, we filled up our 42,000 bushel grain bin with corn. O.o But we don’t normally get near that much.

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It’s so funny – growing up on a farm, we measure things by acres, silo-heights, or relative to certain fields or pastures. Comparing size/distance to football fields or city blocks or is not very helpful to me. 😛

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And we’ll end with a pretty sunset picture with the soybean fields beyond. And I think that really is mist, not dust. 😛

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So there you go! That’s (a small part of) how you harvest a corn field! I hope you enjoyed the photos and learning a bit more about the way we farm. The yields and numbers are really different depending on where you live, but that’s what it’s like for us. 🙂

Have you seen a field being harvested? Which photo was your favorite?

Thanks so much for reading, dears, and have a lovely day!

***Allison***

P. S. Photos taken with my Nikon D3400 and a 35mm lens. Edited in Lightroom.

42 thoughts on “Corn Field Harvesting”

  2. Oh my, these are beautiful! I absolutely love the one where they were unloading the corn into the semi (5th from the bottom) SO PRETTY! ❤
    My grandpa is a wheat farmer, and we've sometimes gone to help him with the harvest, and it's pretty similar to what y'all are doing here! So fun!

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  3. I have most definitely seen a field harvested. 😀 We only grow sweet corn, so we use a corn picker instead of a combine, but of course the header is the same. This was so fun to see, and relatable for me. I love seeing people clear across the country from us harvesting in much the same way. 🙂 Beautiful pictures! Golden hour is the best time for photos.

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    1. Hehe, I knew you would. 😉 It was so lovely to hear from you, dear! Wow, really? I’ve never seen sweet corn harvested – just field corn. That’s so neat! And YES, golden hour is definitely the best time for photos. *nods*

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    1. Why am I just now seeing all your lovely comments?? Apologies for not responding to them sooner! Anyway, I like that photo too. And it is! It’s a lot of hard work for my dad and brothers, especially, but it’s also super fun. ❤

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  9. Dear Allison,
    I hope you did end up having a lovely Thanksgiving! I have been lucky enough to watch a field being harvested once. It was one of those jobs where it was very loud and busy, but everyone was happy to work. I wonder if this is sort of the mood that surrounds harvesting in general, as I sense the same feeling when my family and I clean out our vegetable garden in the fall.

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    1. Thanks so much, Nicole! I did indeed have a wonderful Thanksgiving. ❤ How was yours? Ooh that's so neat that you got to watch a similar harvest! Hehe, it is definitely loud and busy, and my dad and brothers all get excited about the harvest. There are bad days and good days, of course, but I think it does make them happy. 🙂

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  11. As usual, your photography skills are breathtaking! The corn looks so cool in the golden hour light. I’ve never seen corn being harvested before, which is really interesting! Love this post, have a great day!

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  14. That’s so cool! I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. I actually got to practice my photography skills on Thanksgiving. My family got together and played football and I took some action shots. It was a lot of fun.

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