MAIZE rows adjacent to the Riverina Highway near Howlong are being felled one after the other as the Bakers finish up their harvest.
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Maize may not be a traditional Riverina crop, but Richard Baker, along with his brothers Peter and Paul and father Barry — known as Belgium Seeds — have taken advantage of the stock feed in recent years.
About 200ha of maize was sown this summer, along with 300ha of lucerne seed.
The crop is sustained by centre-pivot irrigation fed by a bore.
They planted their first maize crop about eight years ago, taking a few years off before getting back into it.
“If it’s a good price we’ll sow it,” Mr Baker said.
The corn is sold to Melbourne for horse feed and to Nathalia dairy farmers.
It is also used in the Bakers’ own feedlots — a 999-head of cattle feedlot and a lamb feedlot that expanded to 3000 head this week.
“We’ve also got some orders to bale about 400 tonne of maize stubble,” Mr Baker said.
They have also baled silage in the past.
The harvest started about four weeks ago but has been held up by rain on and off.
The ground has been consistently too wet to take to the paddock in the header.
Mr Baker hopes it will be wrapped up soon, but again it’s a case of farmers looking to the sky and being at the mercy of the weather.
A header, with specialised front, harvests maize from its 30-inch row spacing in a similar way to other cereals.
“The cobs are plucked off the plant,” Mr Baker said.
The cobs then go through the header, with a knife at the front of the header shredding the stalks.
The grain is twisted off the cobs in the header, before they are discarded back to the paddock.
This year’s maize crop has been harvested at about 18 per cent moisture.
It is then dried down to about 14 per cent moisture in a specialised machine that can dry 20 tonnes each hour.
Mr Baker said the average maize yield was about 10t/ha.
The Bakers’ best yields have been about 11t/ha and another paddock, which was flowering during the February heatwave, has been recording about 8t/ha.
The crop was sown a bit late in mid- December, the year before it was sown in mid to late November.
When the maize harvest is finally out of the way, the Bakers will be turning their attention to sowing wheat and lucerne.
First they’ll have to burn out the maize stubble.
“It’s a lot thicker than wheaten stubble,” he said.
