Neil from Messick's here, out to go for a ride in this awesome Krone Big X forage harvesters. These are some of the most powerful, large machines that we sell. This one is really special in a couple of ways. We're going to spend some time in the cab out here today with Kevin from Fahnestock Farms here in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania. Come along with me. I think it will be an interesting ride.
So I had to chuckle this morning when I went to come out here because I went out and poked my head out with Jeremy. And I said, is there anybody out running a harvester that I can go see today?
And he didn't even feel like he needed to call you.
He was like, we're just going to jump in the truck and go. I was like, wait, if I'm going to come out with cameras and drones and stuff, man, you got to give the guy a heads up first.
So what, tell me a little bit about your relationship with him.
That you guys know each other so well just to be able to jump out and do that.
Yeah, right. Well, we actually go to church together now. I see him every week. And yeah, we just had a great relationship over the last quite a few years. And I think he was in the chopper with me for probably five hours yesterday.
And he had a couple of pizza boxes in his truck this morning.
Yes, yeah.
So is he just riding along or was he actually helping you work?
I think he was trying to make a sale. Yeah, well, he was trying to do it. Let's be honest here.
Well, it's good to see our guys out doing that kind of stuff, whether they're trying to make a sale or not. Right. You know, the understanding of the equipment and that kind of stuff comes from being out here with guys like you and not sitting behind his desk.
Probably one of the main reasons why I bought this machine, a shout out for Brandon Dooster, He worked for me for quite a few years before he went to Massachusetts. It's sad to see him leave. But I knew almost from day one when he started working for me that someday he was going to make a really good mechanic for somebody. And I wasn't big enough that I could hire a full-time mechanic. So having him at my fingertips 24-7 pretty much so. Yeah. It's very valuable.
That's a great testimony for selling equipment like this. It's not the, yeah, take all the credit away from Jeremy and his pizzas now.
Right, that's right. The salesman is just a pretty face.
It's the guys that come out with the truck with something that's wrong that's really, that is what makes all the difference in the world. Yeah. So you guys are central Pennsylvania farmers here. You're actually only about, what, five miles away from our Mount Joy store.
Yeah, probably not even that far. It's kind of nice, actually.
Makes it convenient. You can drive the machine right down the road if we need to for some reason. How long is your family farm for?
Oh, it's third generation. Okay. So, grandpa started it back in 60, early 60s, I guess it was. Milk 400 cows.
Okay. And so the corn that we're out here doing today is pretty much exclusively going for your dairy then?
Yes. Yep. All my crops do.
Yeah. So we're chopping right now in August, right? End of August? Yes. It's a little early. Yep.
Not been the best growing year.
No, that's what happens when it doesn't rain.
Oh, yeah. We go through good spots and not so good spots in the field here. It looks like we're actually in a good spot right now.
Yeah, this is some of the best I've chopped all year so far. Still not 25 ton corn saws or anything like that.
So how does that, as far as a business owner, right? Yeah. So how does that, how does that impact your operation when it's something as simple as a little bit of a drought happens here in the peak of the growing season? What, what is the impact for you in that?
Oh, it's pretty huge. Like last year, I didn't have to buy any grain corn at all. This year I'll probably have to buy 20,000 bushels or so. So $6 corn, that makes a difference.
So you're, you're basically supplementing because you're not getting the nutritional value up out of the field here. Right. You're going to have. You're going to have to supplement. Yes, exactly.
Less starch in the corn sallage, so then you need to feed more corn, plus you get less.
So as an operator of a machine like this, there's a lot going on for you to pay attention to, right?
Yes.
So as you're driving along here, what, what all are you paying attention to?
Oh, number one, real independent hedge are pretty nice. You don't even have to worry about staying on the road. You don't have to worry about staying on the row quite as much as you used to have to but, uh, keeping the sallage in the cart is probably the biggest thing.
Not blowing it out in the ground or. So the, am I right, the machine on this has, has some feelers out there that help keep you in the rows?
It does have auto steer, um, on contours here like this. It's not, well, I plant with an eight row planter and I have a six row head, so it doesn't work the best if, if the guy planting didn't do his job properly.
So you're. To what degree are you steering then? Are you just.
Right now on this contour, I'm steering all the time. Once I get a nice straight rows, I can kick the auto steer in and just let it, let it go. Yeah.
When we're out in a combine, there's a lot of concern about the height of the head and how the reels are running. What are you paying attention to down there as far as the head goes?
Uh, this has auto sense on height. Okay. So I really don't worry about anything.
Your, your really sole concern is keeping the thing on, in the row and then. Keeping eye on the cart.
Yes.
So this is a 480.
Yes. Right.
Which is in Krone, the smallest harvester that they make us makes a lot of sense for us here in small field, central Pennsylvania.
Right. When I bought it four years ago, that was plenty big enough. Okay. As you get bigger, you wish you always had more, but, um, no, this suits my needs quite well. Um, I always efficiency is when you have carts continually running and. Nobody. Sitting. Right. Uh, sometimes you get these really big machines, whether you just need more help and we do everything myself. So, right. Um, I don't hire anybody to, uh, to help. So having enough, it just flows.
So even, even now where we're sitting here waiting for carts to catch up with us, if you had a bigger machine, you would just be sitting longer, sitting longer. Right. Right. Yeah. I know we've had phone calls before from guys who just starting out. Yeah. I'm going to get into a custom harvesting business. Give me that. Biggest. Harvester that you've got. Right.
Bigger is always better. Right.
It biggers always better. Right. And not, not understanding all of the other stuff that comes along with keeping that machine fed and keeping the carts moving and that efficiency side of, yeah. Yeah.
I still fill some silos yet, so you can bury the, you can easily bury the blower with this machine. Right.
Um, works great for our small field. Yeah. Fields. Yes.
Wish I had an eight row head, but outside of that, always something on the wishlist.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going what? Three, four or five mile an hour. An eight row head would be too much. You'd have to run too slow.
On a year like this year would be fine. Like last year when was really, then it'd be, you'd be down to like two and a half, three probably.
Okay. Yeah.
This year running right around five and a half to six mile an hour.
Okay. So you could handle an eight row this year.
Probably. Yeah.
So who has the harder job here? You or the cart driver?
That's a good question. My job's easy. If the, if the card operator does a good job,
Depends who's in the seat of each machine.
Exactly. If the guy over here is blowing stuff all over the place.
He can either make me look really good or really bad.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you will fill that cart in what? How long?
Oh boy. I don't know if I ever really even timed it to be honest with you. So to what?
Probably two and a half, three minutes.
Yeah. If it's, if it's long straight roads where I'm continually chopping. Yeah. Right.
And today we have what? Three carts.
Yes.
Am I right on that?
Yep. Yep.
Keep, keep an eye on these going back and forth. So again, when you had that side. Sizing conversation here, you go through and say, Hey, we can have a bigger head. We can have a bigger machine. We can have more horsepower, but then we've got to have additional tractors and carts and everything to keep up with all of that.
Exactly. Yeah. Extra drivers. Right.
The more time that we spend with the machine sitting there idling, the more fuel we're unnecessarily burning. And so, yeah. Yep. Kind of being efficient is all based upon the tractors keeping up with the harvest or with the.
Yeah.
It's all balancing acrimony. Yeah.
So do you drive in here when you're, you're gauging the load on the machine? Like we're in some good, nice, tall, decent looking corn again. Are you driving mostly by ear by the,
by the sound of the engine or the engine and watching my gauge air load gauge. I usually keep max out of a hundred percent there. And a nice feature on this machine is if you take it, if this cutter head starts dying down too slow, uh, it'll stop the feed roll. Okay. To keep from plugging the machine. So you do have that safety net there when the guy in the cart's running away from you, you can keep speeding up, trying to keep up with him.
Right. Cause he doesn't know how much the machine's struggling.
Right. And if you do hit that point, it'll just kick the feed rolls off and, uh, keep you from plugging the machine.
So how, how has that changed? Cause you guys have been doing this for three generations now, right? So I assume you've seen a lot of, a lot of different harvesting equipment.
Atarted out with a 782 pull type when I was a kid. Okay. Then we moved up to 900 pull type, ran that for many years and went to an FX25, uh, self-propelled and then transitioned away from that to a deer for a couple of years, had that for five years and then bought the Krone.
And how, how has the technology, the machines and that kind of stuff changed?
Oh, phenomenally, uh, just the ease of putting the processor in and out has become a 10 minute job rather than a hours job. Yeah. Um, that, and just the, uh, technology on this screen, just as far as what you can do with the tab of tap of the screen, how you can change. Length of cut, um, at speed, it's about endless.
That looks pretty good back in here.
It's phenomenal back in here. I mean, I know that over this direction had got a little bit more rain than I did at the home farm. And this year it makes all the difference that I have some corn, not more than a couple of miles from here that I don't think it'll even do. Yeah. It's 50 bushel.
Really? Yeah. Funny how you can go from one spot to the next and have such a different.
Yeah.
Year like this for a rain meant so much.
It's been so windy several days where the humidity was really low. That felt nice, but boy, it sure dried things out. Yeah. Thought about technology. This corn right here. I did an experiment this year. We injected hog manure. Okay. Now I'm trying to decide if that's why this is so much better or if it's because they got more rain. It'd be a combination of both, probably.
So you chose to do that because what fertilizer costs are? Yes. So high
and hog manure leaches so easily. So I thought this year would be the best time to try it if ever. Yeah.
So when you do that, you get a, you don't have hogs, so that's not, you get it from a neighboring farmer. Yeah.
Farmer right here actually has a hog barn on one where I get the manure. Yeah.
So you're talking about all the settings and the changes and stuff that you can make on the monitor. So obviously your two big indicators in the middle there are load on the machine, engine RPMs, fuel consumption, tents, like all your normal stuff. Right. But then you had control over what? Length of cut.
Length of cut, processor gap, head speed. One feature I really like about this chopper that I think is unique to Krone, it has hydraulic suspension on the rear axle. Right. Okay. So you can, I think the main reason they put it on there was for pulling the processor out. You can jack the back of the machine up and roll the processor right in underneath it. But it also allows you to. Raise and lower the back of the machine and in doing that allows the machine to turn a lot shorter. Okay. Which is nice with a six row head. I can go out and turn and come right back in again.
As you're going through, you're making those changes, what's the impact on the crop that you're producing by tweaking that stuff? What are you looking for exactly?
This actually has a automatic. It senses the moisture. Okay. The moisture of the crop and can change the length of cut on the go. Okay. So especially in a year like this year, when you have dry knobs and green low areas, it will, as you get into drier stuff, it'll shorten the length of cut because dry fluffy feed doesn't pack near as well. Okay. Less digestible. So. It decreases the length of cut and as you get into greener stuff, it lengthens, it does that automatically while you're chopping.
So the implications of that are so that your trench packs better.
Yes.
When you try to crop down and why is that so important? The reason for doing that is.
When you're packing, you need to get all the oxygen out, which is very important so it ferments properly. And also for digestibility. As it gets drier, you want to cut it a little shorter
to make some better quality feed crop by. So potentially you came out here and you set all this stuff up wrong, your trench doesn't pack properly, your crop rots, and all this goes to waste if you don't know how to do the settings properly. Correct.
I wouldn't say it all goes to waste, but there's little things. There's what makes a couple extra pounds of milk and
those little 1%s that make it profitable at the end of the year.
Exactly. Farming is a business of small gains and profitability, so you got to maximize everything.
Ours is too. You're always watching the little things and it makes all the difference at the end of the year.
Pennies make dollars.
Yeah. Did you run Kemper heads at all on your other machines?
I did on my deer, yes. I ran the small drum. Okay.
And how do you find, so this is obviously a different setup. A setup that's very unique to Krone with the chain gathering head. Right. How do you find that different?
It's a much better design. The small drum Kemper was good when it first came out. Yeah. I thought it was wonderful. I have a real independent head, but it dropped, the worst thing I didn't like about it, it dropped a lot of ears.
Okay.
This head here, the stalk goes in standing up and just lays over and goes in, cut end first.
So you're not dragging stuff across the machine as much.
Correct. And you don't have the stalk shaking as it goes across. The Kemper heads now are much better. Never experienced one of them, but these heads do really well on down corn as well.
You do have to follow the row though, as opposed to being independent, right?
You don't have to.
Okay.
No, you can kind of go wherever you want. It does a little bit better if you follow the row, but I don't get too fussy about.
If you were trying to clean up a funny corner or something like that.
I just round it off. When I'm opening up, I just round off corners and then come back and get them.
It's not like you can't if you want to.
Right. It's going to be interesting to see what happens with, that milk price is really good right now, but it's backing off. The input costs are just like astronomical. There's no good way to try to make any kind of educated business decisions right now because you just flat out don't know.
Yeah. Just keep going and at the end of the year, we're all going to be surprised at, well, good or bad.
Yeah. Right. Right.
It could go either way. So on that note, you think the general public seems to think that you get all kinds of support from the government on that kind of stuff. So if things go bad, you have a drought year, the milk price dries up, what happens? Lean years? Uncle Sam doesn't come running in with his checkbook to bail everybody out.
No. Pull the belt buckle a notch tighter and figure out how to do it.
Cross your fingers that the next year is a little bit more forgiving.
We've been pretty spoiled here the last couple of years in our area. Yeah. Yeah. Phenomenal crops.
But all that does is push land rent higher and higher and at the end of the day, I don't think you make any more money.
That's those one percents we were talking about, right? Yes. It's trying to keep your eye on where things make sense and where they don't.
I hope you enjoyed that. If you enjoy this large farm equipment, we have got a awesome group of sales staff that gets out in the field with these guys that really understands how this equipment works. Be glad to hook you up with a bunch of them. They have all kinds of tools in order to make your operation a little bit more profitable. If you're shopping for a piece of equipment and we can help or if you've got parts of service needs for a machine you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.
