Heil Harvesting LLC

08/28/2026

After we finished up in far northeast Colorado, we drove down have another look at our work in central Colorado. These proso millet fields have had some decent rain since we were last here about two weeks ago. The improvement in crop quality is pretty astounding. It looks like very harvestable crop now! It's incredible what some rain can do (no kidding, right?). The fields are vastly improved over how they looked just a couple weeks ago. A few of them are just starting to turn. It's time to get the equipment moved and get ready to roll here.

08/27/2026

Sunset on the organic millet harvest along the Kansas/Colorado state line! Time to get ready to move on to our next project.

08/26/2026

Rolling through the final field of organic proso millet on the Kansas/Colorado state line. The first field we swathed has been harvested, and the yield was pretty decent. Organic millet is worth about twice what conventional millet is worth, so the value was pretty decent, too.

08/25/2026

08/24/2026

Back in the field in far (far, far) northeastern Colorado, right along the Kansas state line.

We ended up doing this work at three separate times. The fields just didn't mature at the same time. While it was expected that the first field would be earlier because it was planted about a week earlier, the fact that the second two fields didn't mature at the same time is a mystery to everyone as they were planted at the same time (but after the first field).

08/21/2026

While inspecting the 30-foot header we brought back from the stripper stubble fields in Texas, we discovered one of the draper roller motors leaking oil. Closer inspection revealed major issues -- the motor shaft had been working in the roller and had completely eaten away the woodruff key and the interior of the end of the roller, as well as damaging the supporting arm that holds the motor. The oil leak wasn't from the connection of one of the hoses going to the motor. It was from around the shaft itself. We'd been close to having a major breakdown. We were very thankful to have finished up in Texas before it became a work-stopping problem!

So, we pulled the canvas open, pulled the motor off, removed the roller, took the tensioner assembly apart to get the support arm off, replaced and reassembled everything, and -- one serious black eye later due to poor wrench placement and someone being in the wrong place at the wrong time -- got it back together and ready to run in the next field ... whenever and wherever that might be.

08/20/2026

We made a quick trip to Colorado about 10 days ago to check out the progress of the proso millet crop there and talk to a few customers. It's a mixed bag, mostly on the negative side -- no surprise, but still a little discouraging anyway. All of the millet (as well as every other fall crop, tree, stalk of grass, etc.) at that time was in desperate need of a drink. The fields generally are very uneven, with spots that look decent and spots where the plants are 5 inches tall and curling up.

There has been some rain there since we visited; now it remains to be seen what the effects are. Did it perk up the millet crop? Did it make previously unsprouted seed emerge, leading to crops with two very different maturity dates intermingled in the same field? Time will tell. A couple of our regular farmers planted zero acres of proso this year, so the rain won't make any difference at all for their millet crops. Another farmer received an absolute toadstrangler of a storm, 4 inches of rain in less than an hour that flattened his millet and caused terrible erosion -- it will be interesting to see how (or if) those fields recover.

08/19/2026

Other things we've been doing: We'd replaced the sickle in one of our 40-foot headers a couple months ago. We decided the second header also really needed a new sickle after running it in Oklahoma. We ordered it and it's a good thing we weren't in a desperate hurry for it. It had to come from Winnipeg. When it still hadn't arrived after two weeks, we went a different route and had one from our people in Yuma in two days (you all know who you are, and we appreciate you!).

As a side note, this is a MacDon ultracoarse sickle. While we love (love, love) the function of the ultracoarse sickle, we find sliding them into the guards to be an absolute nightmare. The teeth catch on the guards, and because they're so heavy duty, they have to actually be pried loose before the sickle can continue to be put in. It is incredibly time consuming. No amount of careful handling or careful angling or WD-40 or guard loosening or any other trick we have tried has helped. Does anyone else run into this problem? Does anyone have a good solution?

08/18/2026

Somewhat unexpectedly, we are in the field again! One of our customers in far northwest Kansas (really far northwest; this field is just on the west side of the Colorado-Kansas line, but the customer lives in Kansas) has some early organic proso millet that's quite nice and is ready to see a swather. This work was, in fact, truly a welcome surprise for us; we haven't worked for these customers for a couple years due to other conflicts, and we were pleased to hear from them.

This is an incredibly early* start to the proso millet swathing season, if you're keeping track for some reason. This field was planted early, and then the hot dry weather really pushed it along. There's a little more to do, but the remaining millet was planted a little later and is still too green to be swathed. Now we're in hold mode.

* - As almost always is the case, our Facebook posts don't occur in real time. You're seeing this today, but we did this work about 10 days ago. The generally anticipated start date for proso millet swathing in northeast Colorado is right around Labor Day -- very early September, or maybe the final days of August for an early field.

08/17/2026

So we obviously aren't in the field swathing. What ARE we doing?

Spoiler alert: We are not just hanging out in the mountains or on a beach somewhere. No vacation pictures to share!

One thing we've done is attend a winter canola information meeting presented by Scoular Grain and Kansas State at the invitation of Jeff Frazier, Scoular's market development manager for the oilseed crush facility at Goodland, Kansas. Jeff is working to dramatically increase the number of winter canola acres in this region. (Little plug for Jeff: He's needing 400,000-plus acres of canola production to supply the Goodland crush facility, so if you're interested in seeing whether it's a possibility for your farm, call him for program information at 316-570-2239. He is super friendly and helpful, and he'll have info and answers for you.)

We know nothing at all about growing canola, but in the past we've done a fair bit of canola swathing in Texas -- the photo with the swather is us swathing a field near Abilene in 2018. Some people do straight-cut canola, but it generally needs to be swathed for best results. The fields, and even individual plants, often don't mature evenly, so to reduce the number of green canola seeds at harvest, the canola is swathed and allowed to mature in windrows. In addition, canola has to be very dry at harvest, usually less than 10 percent moisture to be accepted by the end user and often less than 8 percent for good storage. Getting an entire field that dry with the crop standing is difficult: The earlier-maturing plants (or earlier-maturing parts of plants) have dropped their seeds from the pods by the time later-maturing plants (or later-maturing parts of plants) are dry enough to harvest. If the canola is swathed, that problem is resolved.

We distributed information about our swathing services at the meeting and generally just made sure our name is out there. Will this result in future work? There's no way to predict it. Maybe nobody calls, or maybe the timing conflicts with other commitments in other fields. We'll just have to wait and see. If nothing else, there was a lot of info that was quite interesting to us regarding the benefits of growing canola, a profit comparison of canola vs. wheat, and the Goodland crush facility.