The Great Corn Watch Days 21-22. (And the End of September.)

So cutting Rod's dryland corn, or rather, sitting with the grain cart watching Dad cut Rod's corn, (and just so you know, the Great Corn Watch won't end until ALL the corn is cut...) gave me a chance to finally get to the bottom (or top?) of what the heck was wrong with the Puma's speakers. As you no doubt remember, the Puma had suffered some hail damage in "the" storm to require a new cab roof. Well, ever since I had gotten it back (day 18) the radio speakers sounded horrible. So I finally broke down and pulled off the speaker grates in an attempt to check the speakers' wiring. But when I pulled the grates off, I did not find speakers, I found this:

A good quarter inch of foam sandwiched between the grate and the actual speaker. Apparently they ship the inside roof lining with this foam over the grates to keep the screws from causing problems.

The second field of Rod's took much longer than the first.

Because it was laying sideways.



Pretty much the whole field.

Well I had just assumed throughout the summer as I drove past this field that it had borne the brunt of some isolated straight line wind storm (not unusual in these parts, the isolated part I mean, you would be surprised.) But this was not the case. This corn had no brace roots!
Or, rather, the brace roots had never finished growing. You can see here the two rows of brace roots that just stopped growing before they reached the ground.
What caused this is certainly up to debate, but Dad figured it was due to some kind of herbicide interaction. For whatever reason, this particular hybrid, sprayed with whatever particular herbicide on whichever particular day under whatever particular environmental conditions caused these plants to shut down brace root production.
And it certainly made a mess out of harvest. I don't think Dad has ever been so happy to have to leave to load seed wheat and make me finish the field myself.

The most surprising thing of all, is that we hauled just as much grain off of this field as the other one. With the harvest losses we were seeing in the field (sideways corn does not exactly feed into a corn header very well) that means that this field actually yielded quite a bit better than the other one, sans brace roots. Weird.