FUD Electric farm tractors and combines (2023 Update)

The link I used to describe types of corn didn't work when I tried it. Maybe this will.

Or a fleet... I posted a couple of videos. A 12 row combine keeps the 'second device' damn busy transferring just the corn.

There is a use. Till or no-till the residue enriches the soil. A cornstalk doesn't magically construct itself from thin air. Sure you can use it for biomass but TANSTAAFL.

What would the world do without high fructose corn syrup?

That's an interesting movie. One of the first things the city kids learn is dent corn isn't very edible without grinding it to meal or making hominy.

So say the cornucopians... (no pun intended)

After the oil embargo there were attempts to replace some of thermoset molding compound with furan. It didn't go well.

The soybean car was a bridge too far but Ford was using soybean derived plastic for trim moldings, gearshift knobs and so forth in the '30s.

My high school was surrounded by corn -- a great way to ditch class and NEVER be found! But, the farms were considerably smaller -- more like subsistence farms (acres not thousands of acres). "Big" farms harvested tree fruit.

Don't they rotate what/where each crop is grown? Or, do they rely on chemical enrichment to keep "restoring" the soil nutrients?

We worked on a process to *coat* seeds (herbicide? fertilizer?) but I can't see how that could be economical -- except for special crops or special conditions (it takes hours to coat a few hundred pounds).

Or, it could have just been a proof of principle (or even patent proof) exercise waiting for a more practical means of deployment.

Popcorn is Zea mays everta. Dent corn, which is the vast majority of the corn grown in the US is Z. mays indentata. Sweet corn is Z. mays saccharata. Z. mays indurata is flint corn (Indian corn) and everta is a variant. You can pop Indian corn if you want variety.

Dent corn is starchy. Even if you pick the ears early like sweet corn it's not tasty. We used to call sweet corn that was tough and not very sweet 'cow corn'. I grew up in dairy country and the dent corn was harvested green for silage rather than the much more complex system than came abut with industrial farming. Of course the cow manure was spread on the fields in the springtime, completing the cycle.

If you have a mill as an experiment dry some sweet corn, shell it, and grind it into meal. Even though a lot of the sugar becomes starch as it dries it's going to be a taste treat compared to commercial cornmeal from dent corn.

Yet another meaning of lodging...

When Borlaug was working with wheat he introduced Japanese dwarf wheat into the mix to get short, fat stem not as susceptible to lodging. Big, full heads that fell over in a light breeze didn't cut it.

That works without going into all the Z. mays designations. Horses for courses.

Build a machine 20 times bigger and it will still take hours to coat a few tons.

Lose weight, probably.

It depends on the farmer. Soybeans loosen the soil. They're legumes but are pigs on nitrogen consumption. Farmers are usually going to apply some type of fertilizer. One of the modern changes is actual soil testing. I guess modern combines can monitor the yield as they go and gps can map the problem area for more investigation. More on beans.

The University of Nebraska is a big deal for tractor testing. Raising two crops lets a farmer hedge his bets on the selling end, also. There isn't much wheat in my immediate area. Winter wheat is raised more in the drier southwest area of Nebraska than here in the south central part. There is an organic farm a couple miles from me. I think it was in corn the last time I saw it. It was a mess of crop and weeds.

Seed corn has been coated with some sort of disease/bug killer since I was a kid. Call it 1960. It was usually pink. Here's a link to Corteva Seed.

Corn, wheat, soybean, and other seeds get treated. Seed corn has always been expensive stuff. Field corn farmers sold might've been $2 or $3/ bushel (56 lbs.) Seed corn might've been around $70 per 50 lb. bag if my memory is anywhere close. Today's farmers don't generally handle bags. They use things like this. . It used to be a waste of effort to wave at a farmer planting corn or beans. He was staring at the mark laid down on the previous pass to keep the row spacing consistent. It's a waste of time now because they're playing with their smart phones. Tractors are GPS guided.

This was more recent -- 80's. The equipment being used was intended for use with pharmaceutical products. It seemed (at the time) that use with seeds would be problematic:

- use of organic solvents seemed like it would be tricky (seed viability?)

- use of aqueous film seemed like it would risk adding too much moisture

- the temperatures experienced in forcing evaporation of the solvent seemed like they might damage the product

- lot sizes are relatively small and processing time relatively *long*

[but, I have a bit less than zero knowledge of what seeds, in general (let alone specific crops that might have been targeted) can tolerate]

I.e., the process works for pharmaceuticals because:

- batches are smaller (you can't mix two different pharma products so you're only processing *a* batch of *a* product -- even at 1M/hr, you've got a whole hour before the next batch will be ready!),

- the compounds can be chosen to tolerate the solvents/films/temperatures used

- there is a relatively high value to many of the products processed this way (you can sell a tablet for a fraction of a dollar or many dollars; how much can you sell *a* seed?)

Imagine 50 pounds of <pick-your-pharmaceutical>

Photos/illustrations to put in perspective:

general overview:

a modest sized pan:

[examine 4th photo in row across bottom]

schematic of process:

[Note direction of rotation... tablets "climb" the exhaust side of the pan]

close up of tablets in pan:

[note perforations in pan wall and lie of tablet bed]

I was only a kid and have no idea what the composition was but I remember stirring a black, foul smelling liquid into seed corn to prevent the crows from eating the kernels faster than you could plant them.

I never did a lot of it but I have not so fond memories of harrowing a field with an old Minneapolis-Moline. No air conditioned cab with an entertainment system, just head for the horizon, turn around and come back.

I got careless, turned too tight, and pinched a tire. Of course the tire was ballasted with a calcium chloride solution that gave me a little shower on every rotation on the way back to the barn.

Actually I blame it on the MM. It had a fuel leak so a gasoline buzz was part of the process.

The whole USDA 'get big or get out' philosophy from LBJ's day is geared to producing cheap food to keep hoi polloi fat, dumb, and happy, no healthy food.

There had to be a "special reason" to use a coating pan for this task. They aren't cheap, small, high throughput, etc. What they *can* do is "guarantee" a consistent coating -- from unit to unit (seed to seed) and batch to batch.

So, it could be that it was being examined as a research platform to allow folks to "formulate" their coatings (which they would apply in a more economical fashion "in production")

Corn fields are *so* much better for carnal^H^H^H kernel exploration!

It's more that US food merchandising is aimed at making the food they sell addictive, so that the customers eat more of it than they should, killing their appetite for food manufactured by the competition. The fact that their customers end up obese is just a side-effect.

Hey Bozo, you are REALLY a DORK! Do you have ANY IDEA how many batteries it would take to keep an electric combine going 24/7? I SERIOUSLY DOUBT IT!!

BTW Deere is spelled DEERE, n Dere, and truck is spelled TRUCK, not track.