Eastern Iowa Farmer Spring 2021

mother nature
and moved to town, but Lee recalled he
was still helping farm on his 90th birthday.
The Crock family has spent countless
hours working to salvage and restore their
farming operation. Covid-19 has created
a few challenges, but it also presented
opportunity as the boys were quarantined
from high school for the month of
September and helped around the farm
tending to their 150 head Angus herd,
hogs and the crops. The girls helped when
they could; one is a nurse and the other a
full-time college student.
The challenges continued as the
Crocks harvested their corn crop. Their
bins hadn’t been replaced – there was a
severe lack of labor available to install
them – forcing them to contract corn and
sell a majority of their crop to neighbors
because they don’t have storage available
like years past.
All 1,800 acres of their corn and
soybean crop and 700 acres of custom
farmed corn and soybeans were affected,
forcing them to combine with a reel to
help salvage as much corn as possible
from the downed plants.
Lee also was forced to combine east to
west, a very time-consuming job, that was
frequently interrupted for scrap removal.
The harvest crew this year consisted
of Lee in the combine, Lori in the grain
cart, their hired man, Jacob Kirkpatrick,
and a neighbor in the skid loader pulling
out scraps of bin, hog confinement roof
and lumber trying to keep the combine
moving.
With a few days left, Lee noted it was
an exceptionally difficult harvest on the
combine as he replaced eight snoots,
two roller cones, one feeder house chain,
and 12 gathering chains and dislodged
the cross auger, all due to unseen debris
in the field and simply having to run the
corn head so low trying to get as much
of the downed corn as possible. While
the soybeans averaged 50 bushel an acre
yield, the corn suffered significantly. On
average in a typical year corn will be
around 200 bushels to the acre. This year,
Crock averaged 93 bushels to the acre
creating yet another financial downfall.
Another challenge that loomed for the
Crocks was what to do with their cows.
In a normal year, he would combine corn,
bales and cornstalks for bedding, and then
turn cows out in the cornfield to forage
what’s left behind.
Last fall, he decided not to bale in
fields where cows would graze as a means
to prevent bloat, overeating, foundering
and, most importantly, dystocia during
calving next spring as cows will be in better
shape putting more weight on calves
at birth.
After no right or wrong answer or
solution presented itself, he decided to
bring the cows home and feed them corn
silage, get them good and full for a week
or two and then turn them out in hopes of
preventing overeating and bloat, which
could potentially end in the loss of cows.
“I’m concerned about it, but I’m going
to risk it,” Lee said as dry lotting them
simply isn’t an option.
In the days and weeks after the storm
Lee focused on the positive, especially
those family members and friends who
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eifarmer.com spring 2021 | Eastern Iowa Farmer 67