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With hot and dry conditions, a lot of canola is well below the 10% moisture considered “dry” by grading standards and often below the 8% moisture level considered safe for long-term storage.
What can you do?
To limit damage, ease off the threshing settings. Seed this dry could be prone to cracking, and cracked seed screens out as dockage and can be a more suitable substrate for microbial activity in the bin. To prevent cracking, consider easing off on concave and rotor settings. Canola that dry often threshes very easily anyway.
Leave swaths out in the rain. As you know based on moisture testing, seeds will take on moisture in moist conditions. Of course the risk here is that once rains start, they don’t stop for a month.
Run moist air through the bin. Running fans on days when air has high moisture content (warmer temperatures and high relative humidity) can reintroduce moisture to the air inside the bin, and seeds will take on this moisture.
Reader question: If moisture drops from 9% down to 5%, what is my yield loss? This calculator from the Grain Commission can help with the math. In this case, if original moisture is 9%, final moisture is 5% and original quantity was 50 bu./ac., actual harvested yield will be 48 bu./ac. at the lower moisture content.
