Farming Video | How Do You Harvest Corn After 60 Days Without Rain?

11 Sep 251m 23s

Johnny Verell’s out in the field, running corn through the combine after a rollercoaster 2025 growing season. It was wet early, then bone-dry for nearly 60 days—and that kind of stress shuts crops down fast. He breaks down how the Estes Concaves have helped him deal with the uneven maturity and fragile ears, letting him slow the machine down and still get clean grain. When your crop’s been through the wringer, the right setup makes all the difference, especially if you’re drying corn. It’s a real-world look at how equipment choices pay off when Mother Nature doesn’t play fair.

00:00:00 Johnny Verell, the extreme ag. You know, we're out here today harvesting some corn, getting ready to start back up this morning 00:00:05 and you know, 2025 has been a year of extremes. We've had extremely wet weather all the way up to July, and then from July to, you know, here it is, the, 00:00:13 I don't know, about the sixth, 7th of September and it's just now got our first rain in almost 60 days. So this combine here, sitting here behind me, 00:00:20 we run Estes Concaves in all of our combines. And I've been running this combine here and you know, you don't think that really matters a lot year 00:00:26 to year if everything's uniform and everything's the same, but when you have a year, like this year 00:00:30 where the crop absolutely shuts down, it dies prematurely sometimes from the drought conditions, stuff like that. 00:00:35 Being able to have a concave that you can actually customize, do a little more with is a big deal. 00:00:39 You know, these, these ears here, you know, we're scrubbing 'em off good and clean. We always kind of go out and check 00:00:45 and see what the size of the cob is so we can set the clearance on the concaves, adjust 'em down. 00:00:49 But the biggest thing I like about the SS concaves, it really allows us to slow our concaves down. We're running the Concaves right now, about 240, 250 RPMs. 00:00:56 Just really letting that corn flow through real slow, keeping it from breaking it up so much. We run most of our corn through a dryer, so being able not 00:01:03 to damage that corn before it goes through the dryer really does cut down the amount of damage coming outta that dryer. 00:01:07 So the gentleness of the concaves, how they're able to be a little more aggressive just 'cause of how they're designed naturally 00:01:12 and you're able to slow that RPM down on that concave has been a big deal for us 00:01:16.545 --> 00:01:18.365