Heil Harvesting LLC

09/03/2026

We're also getting our trailer house* to Colorado. Continuing the theme of this being a weird year, we have never moved into the trailer at the end of August before. That's usually an April/May event, so this is months later than we usually get moved in and hit the road with it. It's different to move for what you anticipate to be month instead of what you anticipate to be 6-9 months! You might think that we had brought quite a bit less along with us, but it turns out that the things you anticipate needing for six weeks of normal life are about the same things you anticipate needing for six months of normal life, and that's what we brought. The difference is that instead of moving it back into the house in 6 months, we expect we'll probably be doing it in six weeks. Everyone say it with us: This is a weird year!

* -- or RV, or camper, or whatever you want to call it. We would note that this is by definition a trailer house, not a camper, because it has no holding tanks for water and no generators -- our trailer requires full electrical and water/sewer hookups. You would never, ever take this trailer camping, which is why we almost always refer to it as a trailer.

09/01/2026

On the road again! It's time to get our equipment into central Colorado so we're ready for the proso millet swathing season there when it begins. This is just a very strange year, with work oddly spread out. While we're getting ready and set and are looking at starting our season in Colorado soon, we have no reason to believe that it will be a steady process once the farmers say "GO!". Everyone has talked about uneven emergence and varying planting dates and how they suspect we'll work a little and then wait a little for the next fields to be ready, and then work a little and wait a little more. While we almost always do some of that (especially at the start of the season), it sounds like there's going to be quite a lot of stop-and-go this year, considerably more than normal and stretching on longer than it usually would. But ... we'll see. Another interesting thing about this year is that absolutely nothing has been predictable.

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?