MacDon Performance Stories - Schuurmans Farms
Schuurmans Farms of South Dakota have been around since the 1950s and are currently farming cattle, corn, wheat and soybeans. See how the MacDon C Series Corn Header helps them #GETMORE!
Video Transcript:
Scott Schuurmans is my name, I’m from Tyndall, South Dakota. Scott Schuurmans Farms is the name of the operation. I farm with my son in law, and I have four daughters and nine grandchildren. So, I’ve been very blessed that way. We raise around 1800 acres of corn and about 1800 acres of beans and we’ll raise anywhere from 200 to 300 acres of wheat. Winter wheat. My dad started this farm when he got out of the service, I believe was like 1952 or 1953. When he rented this place, there was pretty much nothing here at the time, then it evolved into this. So it’s come a long way since then. He’s actually ninety-three years old and still around here. Helps out once in a while.
I have, three trucks that are over the road to haul distillers feed and then livestock also. And then we have a couple of farm trucks that haul out of the field. And we feed cattle, fatten-out cattle, probably 1800 head a year. We primarily buy anywhere from 6 to 9 weight cattle, I buy as feeder cattle, and then I finish them to 1400 to 1600 pounds, depending on what type of cattle I’m feeding. It’s a good way to move some corn to through the cattle and to enhance the farm. This is the grain facility back here, so we can we don’t have a leg or anything, but we can hold 200,000 bushels worth of corn here. And then we put our silage and stuff over there and back here is the grain facility. We have a dryer, we don’t use it a lot anymore because the varieties of corn and everything has been a lot dryer. Then we feed a lot of our corn to the cattle so we can have it a little wetter, and I get away with that, it saves a lot of expense. Our high moisture is, ideally, we like to do that around 28% moisture. And then our dry corn to get it dry is 15% moisture. So you can usually put the dry corn in the bins from 18% and below with air on it would be fine. But if you get over 21% or 22%, that you want to do with like high moisture, then you have to crack it and pack it.
It's primarily LG Seeds, my son allows a dealer for them. And then I do some Syngenta and a little bit of Pioneer. Our harvest has been very good this year, we had a really late spring, and it was a very wet spring. We thought it was going to be a long, wet, late harvest, but we had really dry weather in September and that dried it down. Yields are above average and the corn is dry, so it’s been a fun harvest, actually very enjoyable. We have a scale for stuff coming in and out, it comes in handy for that. We can buy and sell based off of that and keep track for crop insurance purposes as well. We harvest about 30,000 bushel a day, so figure a thousand bushel per load, so it’s 30 loads a day.
We’ve had the MacDon FD2 head for several years, and the dealer that serviced us with that head did a very good job. Then I read that MacDon started into the corn head business and I did a little research on it. I really like the company, so then I got one down to demo one fall, and after I demoed it, I ended up buying that demo. That’s the head we have here. I really like the folding head. It saves a lot of time from moving from field to field, it’s a lot more efficient. It saves an extra guy from pulling the head or trailer around, and having to get off and unhook the head. So we get to the end, and just fold up and away we go. Then take it to the next field and then unfold. It saves a lot of hassle trying to figure out where to hook the head up and unhook the head at and, go from there. It is really a huge advantage I think, in our operation. It integrates with the combine, so I don’t have to add an extra function, like for the folding head or stuff like that. It all integrates well. I had a 12 row head before, and it was a non-folding head. There’s a few fields you can move from, but for the most part, you got to take it off every time you move anywhere. For instance, in this field here is the small field. We’ll be working in here for an hour, then we have to take it off, and then put it on a trailer and move over to another field. That wasted a lot of time, and the efficiency goes down then, too.
160 to 180 is the yields on the corn right now, so it’s variable a little bit but pretty decent. I really like the OctiRoll™ where it pulls the stalk through. These do a phenomenal job of sizing up the crop before it gets to the knives, even if you didn’t run the knives underneath it for the chopping part. I like their design on that, it really cuts it up well. We like chopping our stalks for residue management and we’re starting to do more minimum-till to no-till type operation. It gives us the capability of not having to work the field up or if we want to no-till it, when you come back into the spring it’s really nice. Everything is sized up really nice like a nice blanket across the field and you can plant right into that. Works out fantastic. Then the other thing that was a big push for me on the C Series over other chopping heads is they require less horsepower to run the chopping unit. And the chopping unit is very easy if you don’t want to chop a field for some reason, like if you want to bail it, it takes you literally ten minutes to go and switch every row over to not chop.
The reliability has been good on it. Both the C Series head and the FD2 draper head. For instance, if you have to change a chain or something pops a chain off, they have a nice tool. Very quick to change that compared to my other head that I had, which is very nice. Saves a huge amount of time. I would say, I definitely would demo it, because I think after you ran it, you would appreciate how good it is. Until you actually run it, sometimes it’s hard to visualize what it’s going to be like. And be open-minded about brand. Don’t think that if your combine is Case IH or John Deere, that you have to have that type of head to go with it. The C Series functions very well with it and they adapt well, and I think they got some other nice features on it that the other ones don’t have. I would definitely give it a try.
To learn more about MacDon's C Series Corn Header, click here or visit your local MacDon Dealer for more detail.
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