Harvesting And Processing Of Hybrid Seed Corn At Silver Lane Hybrids

A Silver Lane Hybrids seed field. Planted some time in May and detasseled (the male tassels removed from the female rows) sometime in July. This is done by hand and with a machine. The male plants are removed some time in August. We do this to make harvest easier and prevent mistakes. After pollination the male plants are considered to be weeds.

The male pollen from the male rows fertilize the female plants, this process is what makes the seed produced by the female plants into hybrid seed. This is a view down the rows from the picker. A nice seed field will be pretty well free of grass and weeds. We must be careful what herbicides we use to keep from reducing yields. A 50 bushel yield is considered good.

We are picking next years seed. All this machine does is snap the ear from the plant and move it to the wagon. We use rubber snapping rolls to do this to reduce damage to the seed. The corn now is under 35% moisture and safe to pick. We have our machinery properly sized to complete harvest in a timely manner. We will start harvest the first week in September.

Eating up this years work. It is important that we get the crop harvested before the first freeze, a freeze will hurt quality and may reduce germination.

Into the Farm Hand wagon. We have a lot of seed to harvest so we must move it in a very short time. Our properly sized equipment helps us get the job done.

Quickly fill the truck. One wagon load will fill a truck of this size. It takes two wagons to fill a semi. It takes several trucks to keep our harvester busy.

Now we unload the truck. If the ear corn doesn't come out you have to go in and hand scoop it out, its a lot of work. Our corn dump will hold a full truck load. This machine allows the driver to go get the next load from the field.

Another full truck load ready to be moved into the husking and sorting building. The corn is moved into the husking and sorting building by a drag conveyor.

This machine removes the corn husk from the ears. We use rubber rollers here as well to help preserve the seeds quality. At this point the ears are still wet and must be dried. Did you know that corn will always have an even number of rows on the cob?

Here we sort out the off-types, and bad ears. We also finish husk removal. Bad ears are those ears that are diseased or insect damaged. Off-type ears are those ears that may not be genetically pure. Off-type ears do not look right when compared to normal seed ears. Yes, we do hand sort each and every ear of seed corn that ends up in one of our bags!

Up the seed goes to fill the drier. We use low temperatures and lots of air to remove the moisture from the ear corn. we must get the ears down around 12% moisture for safe storage.

Believe it or not this is great seed. It produced just over 50 bushel per acre and is very nice in size. The inbred plants from which we produce seed corn actually looks like runt corn when planted and will not yield well at all. It is the seed that is produced by hybridization that has the ability to grow tall, be healthy and produce over 200 bushels per acre. This seed is what our customers purchase from us.