by Lucas Veale, Assumption, IL 

If you have a 70 Series that makes a hard turn when you engage autotrac, check the autotrac diagnostics page in the GS3 command center.  Confirm the direction of travel is correct.  You may need to drive 50 yards to get it to switch.  If it is wrong in both directions, the issue is likely the directional control valve switch on the hydro pump.  Also, the back up alarm will be on all of the time.

Corn settings that have been working well:

380

30

1250

22

14

Bean settings that have been working well:

600

10

1000

18

7

Beans are showing 10-12% moisture, but have a lot of butter beans and a ton of green stems.

I have had a couple of cases with cobs that are diseased.  They are much like cardboard that has been wet and dried several times.  It was like a dry sponge and would break up very easily.  The customer was complaining of a lot of corn on the ground.  I asked him if it was still on the cob and he said no.  I got there and raised the chopper (IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU RAISE THE CHOPPER SO YOU CAN SEE FOR SURE WHAT THE COMBINE IS DOING) and found out it was in fact still on the cob, but it was broken up so bad it was going through.  We tried to slow down the rotor and open it up to not break up the cobs but the losses just got worse on the ground. He was also taking in a tremendous amount of trash because the stalk was dead and was breaking off almost as soon as it hit the stalk rolls.  It didn’t seem to matter what we did with the head speed or deck plates,  we still could not do much to reduce trash intake.  We finally had to go to 500 rotor speed and 12 on the concave to help the situation.  We went as far down as 6 on the concave,  but it was not as good as 12.  We verified that his concave was zeroed correctly, but we were still losing about 1 bu/acre or so, but it was the best we could do under the conditions.  I have seen this a couple of times, but it is variety specific.  His combine had been doing a good job in other fields and varieties.  This variety was still yielding very well and was running about 16-18% moisture.

Image to the right: 2015 Soybean Harvest in Central IL. Photo credit Chad Colby @TheChadColby

Sloan Support is written by the product support team at Sloan Implement, a 20 location John Deere dealer in Illinois and Wisconsin.   Learn more at www.sloans.com