Heil Harvesting LLC

10/19/2026

Shadows are growing long on the 2026 millet season.

Why are we even doing this? The crop isn't fantastic, the season is getting late ... and the millet is worth from $15.50 to $17 per hundredweight, or $7.75 to $8.50 per bushel. So, even if the millet is only yielding 20 bushels/acre -- and most of it is better than that -- well, you can do the math and figure out that it's a whole lot better than $0 per acre. And that's why we're doing this. No, it's not the best crop ever, but it's certainly still worth harvesting.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we're done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/17/2026

This proso millet is dry enough and mature enough that our farmers could direct cut it (harvest it with a combine, without it being swathed).

They could, but they can't.

They can't because, like everyone else, they can only be in one place at a time, and right now our farmers are extremely busy drilling the last of their 2027 wheat crop. Here in the high altitudes of central Colorado, it is past time for the winter wheat to be in the ground. The rain was very helpful, but it also delayed planting progress by 10 to 14 days. Planting next year's wheat crop is everyone's top priority right now, and they won't be focused on anything else until that is finished. And this is why we have a job: Our farmers have their own swather and have their own combines, but they'd have to clone themselves to run them right now.

Having us swath the millet keeps it safe in a windrow until our farmers can get their planting finished up and get the combines in the fields. What's happening here is that we are buying them time while reducing their risk exposure. Once the millet is swathed and laid down in the windrow, it's pretty safe from wind and hard rain that would knock the seeds out of the head. The farmers can finish planting wheat and get to the millet harvest whenever they can get to it without worrying too much. In fact, some farmers consider millet in a windrow to be almost like millet in the bin. Yes, it's still in the field, but it's not going to get knocked out of the head and lost -- and millet seeds are extremely mold/decay resistant, so even if the windrows get rained on before the combines arrive, they're going to be mostly fine. If winter arrives early, proso millet can lay in the windrow through the winter, be harvested the following spring and still be fine. That is not desirable (everyone prefers to harvest their millet in the fall!), but it is not terribly uncommon.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we're done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/16/2026

Night swathing. We haven't worked as much in the dark this year as we have in the past. We can't say we're really sad about that. We greatly prefer to work in the daylight. Everything seems to take longer in the dark, and the end of the field seems much farther away! It just hasn't worked out this year that we've run in the dark -- the situation has been that we've finished a field just after dark and can't move to the new one until the sun is up (for safety reasons), or we've been in fields that have been complicated with sharp draws and little surprise ditches, which make running in the dark risky. However, the days are getting shorter so there are fewer daylight hours to run in, this field was allowing us to run in the dark, and we are really needing to get finished here in central Colorado. The millet is beyond ready to have been swathed and the forecasters are talking about big changes in the weather. The time for swathing millet is growing very short.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we're done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/15/2026

The day before the alternator quit, the bearing went out of the tensioner for the engine belt. The day after the alternator quit, the reel drive chain broke and the reel stopped turning. Do breakdowns come in threes? We don't know, but we're hoping this is the end of our little streak!

The reel drive chain was completely worn out. We'd never had any trouble with it before, so we hadn't messed with it. But everything eventually breaks ... At first we thought we'd just repair the chain and finish out our season with it -- we are really very close to done with our millet swathing work. Then we discovered we didn't have the right size of connector link in our array of chain repair supplies. Since we were going to have to make the 40-mile drive into town to get a new connector link anyway, we bought new chain while we were there and replaced the entire chain. That 40-mile drive turns a minor breakdown into most of an afternoon of missed swathing. Inconvenient!

We discovered while replacing the chain that the reel drive sprockets are becoming very worn. The reel runs now (actually runs much better than it had been running; clearly the chain had been a problem for a while). It will be fine for the remainder of the millet swathing season, but we'll definitely be revisiting the reel drive area for more thorough repairs this winter -- on this header and on our others, because if one is wearing out, the others surely are not far behind.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. We're now done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/14/2026

We've been very blessed this year with generally excellent performance from our equipment. Aside from a few smaller repairs -- a broken belt on one of the 30-foot timed knife drive headers back in triticale swathing season in May, various sickle guard/section replacements, a roller motor with a shaft problem, things of that nature -- we've been able to just turn on the machines and have them run. If you've ever run equipment, you understand that things often don't go that way. When they do, it's fantastic! We have been both very thankful for it and really enjoying it. You may remember if you've followed along here for a while that this definitely hasn't always been our situation -- for example, there was the year we had electrical problems with the engines on both of our M155 swathers that caused them to randomly die, and then refuse to restart, throughout that year's entire millet swathing season. So frustrating! We do maximal maintenance during our offseason in hopes of reducing the number of breakdowns we have during the season, but the reality is that things don't break unless you're using them ... which means that no downtime at all during the swathing season is a completely unrealistic goal. But it's still our goal!

However ... the alternator on this M155 started making some weird squawking noises off and on, and then one morning when we started the swather, it sounded like a sickly goat. The bearings were going out. A change was absolutely necessary. We had one on hand -- actually it was one we had removed during the aforementioned electrical problems with the swather engines a couple years ago, when someone suggested that maybe the problem that was making the engines die was in the alternator. That led us to try replacing the alternator, which did not resolve the problem, so we ended up with a spare alternator. So, we shut the swather down, replaced the squawking alternator with our spare, and continued on.

We know we'll soon be looking for more fields to put our swathers in. Proso millet season doesn't last forever! If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that failed crop go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.

10/13/2026

Blue skies and progress ahead. We're getting closer to the end of our proso acres. That's good (though we're never happy to see the season end). The millet didn't stop maturing during the 10 days or so of wet weather -- it wasn't dry, but it was maturing. Most of it is approaching full maturity. That means the heads are very fragile, and the seeds are just looking for reasons to shatter out of the heads and scatter on the ground. Rain or strong wind at this point would be very bad news.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we've just finished swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/12/2026

We always love seeing baby wheat in the fields next to where we're swathing! The recent rainy, wet days weren't great for getting the proso millet swathing done, but the wheat (and the people hoping for moisture so they could start/continue/finish drilling their wheat) sure appreciated it. We have driven past a lot of fields of new wheat, and it looks fantastic. The 2027 wheat crop is off to a good start!

If you look carefully, you can see the remains of stubble from the 2025 millet crop in this field of wheat. The millet stubble stands fallow for a year and then the new wheat crop is planted into it.

10/08/2026

If you're not working on your sickle, are you even swathing? Our 40-foot headers each had brand-new sickles going into this millet season, so we actually aren't working on them much at all -- but even so, we do still work on them sometimes. This was just a broken knife section and was easily repaired.

We know we'll soon be looking for more fields to put our swathers in. Proso millet season doesn't last forever! If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that failed crop go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.

10/07/2026

Blowing out the stack of radiators in the swather's airbox, the engine air filter and the cabin air filter are near-daily tasks during proso millet swathing season.

Proso millet is covered with tiny plant hairs called trichomes that get knocked loose during the swathing process, float around and get sucked into the swather's radiators and air system. If we don't blow them out, the trichomes will eventually combine with dust and cover the radiators with a solid layer of soft fuzz similar to thick dryer lint. That layer is almost like a blanket that reduces or even prevents air flow, which will make everything the radiators are supposed to cool (that would be everything from the engine itself to the operator and everything in between) very hot. The fuzz and dust can plug up the engine air filter, which would be terrible for the swather's engine (clean air is absolutely required for the engine) and also would lead to a reduction in power. They also can plug up the cabin air filter, which is the filter that keeps the air inside the swather cab clean. So, the radiators and filters get cleaned with compressed air whenever they need it -- usually daily.

Why only usually? We've found it seems to depend on the condition of the field and the maturity of the millet. The trichomes are more loosely attached on more mature (drier) millet plants, which makes them easier to dislodge. And, obviously, a drier field will be a more dusty field. So, as the season progresses and the fields and the plants generally both become more dry, more trichomes and dust are floating around as we run through the fields, and the radiators and filters get blown out more often. Greener millet in a field that had a recent rain shower probably won't be as much of a problem in terms of dust and hairs, and we probably won't need to clean the radiators and filters as frequently.

10/06/2026