Miller ready for harvest and another planting

MONTICELLO, Ill. — While most farmers’ planters have been cleaned and put away and their focus is now on harvest, Eric Miller’s planter — along with his combine, grain cart and tractors — is ready to go.

“That is one nice benefit of having wheat that needs to be harvested in the summertime is we prepare our combines and trucks and grain carts and tractors for that, so that work is done. As far as drilling wheat, we maintain our no-till drill so that is ready to go, too,” he said.

Miller doesn’t just have harvest on his mind. With the research trials at his farm, the necessary fieldwork continues there.

“Most of them at this point are waiting to harvest. With a lot of the nitrogen trials, we still have to go out and they want us to do stalk nitrate testing, so we’ll have to cut a segment of stalk out of several plants and then send that to the lab to see what the concentration is of nitrate and things like that,” he said.

Miller’s double-crop soybeans will be harvested last, but he has his eye on the harvest date for the full season, shorter-maturity soybeans, since that harvest date will determine the planting date for winter wheat.

“Hopefully, we can get those harvested by that first part of October so we can get the wheat planted in the first couple of weeks of October,” he said.

“Our yield does start to drop off pretty quickly once we get past the first half of October, the wheat yields start to drop off. We’ve got to try to get that early growth in the fall and get it established.”

In between wheat harvest, double-crop soybean planting and maintaining research trials, Miller made time for a vacation out to the Pacific Northwest.

“I highly recommend that. We flew into Portland and stayed in the northwest corner of Oregon. We went to the coast for a couple of days, the Willamette Valley, that big ag production valley south of Portland,” he said.

“We went to Mount Hood and did the Columbia River Gorge area. The diversity of the landscape is amazing. An hour’s drive will put you in a different environment.”

Miller also traveled to his home state, Minnesota, where the family celebrated his parents’ 60th wedding anniversary.

“We had a nice dinner and family get-together. We had my folks break down their 60 years by decades and just write down thoughts and comments on each decade and that was really interesting, what they remembered and what they recalled and how life was back then,” he said.