For the week of August 12th – 19th
Harvest has begun! Last week we combined 500 acres of synergy barley on some of our south land – it was the barley we planted on April 29th. Yield was decent, and surprisingly the quality was also respectable. The barley was 52.4 lbs / bushel – while lighter than we normally have been getting (54-55 lbs) we expected it to be lighter than this due to the hot and dry weather we had in July. Two other important characteristics for malt barley are “plump” which is how fat the kernel is, and protein. The plump was 90% which is on the edge of what maltsters like to see, and protein was 12.8%, which is within the range they like to see (anything under 13% is what they prefer). We sent the samples away for germination and other detailed quality tests that impact marketablity. We have been using SGS as a place to send all our cereals samples to get tested for a list of quality parameters. They are a private company who have locations around the world and are well respected – most grain companies also use them to send for analysis. We still send samples to each grain company we deal with, but having the knowledge of what all our grain quality parameters are prior to committing any of it to move gives us more ability to maximize what we have.
This was the only barley we had down south, we moved north and it was testing mid 20’s so we only finished those few fields. It was good to get the machines running for a few hours – gave everyone a chance to get a feel of running the equipment again, and see if there were any minor repairs we still needed to complete. The barley was testing between 16.5% to 18.5% so it all had to be run through the grain dryer. That’s all been run through now – ready to start back up again hopefully next couple of days!
Forecast is calling for temperatures in the mid 20’s with a higher chance of rain later this week. Hoping we can get the bulk of our barley off before we get any rain.
