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Heil Harvesting LLC

Name: Heil Harvesting LLC
Address: Ulysses, KS, 67880, US
Telephone: +16203534236
Price range: Not applicable

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Heil Harvesting LLC

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Our field is quality swathing in your field. Mark bought his first combine, a Model 60 Allis Chalmers, in 1960.

Heil Harvesting has been proudly owned and operated by the Heil family since 1974, but our harvest history begins long before that. He was just 14, and he used it while he was still in high school to custom harvest for local farmers near his family’s home in eastern Nebraska. Fast forward a few years -- Mark went to college, met and married Dianne, served in the Air Force, and then jumped into the custom grain harvesting business after purchasing a Massey Ferguson 760 combine and some gas trucks. In 1975, Mark and Dianne added another Massey 760 and a truck and started hiring a crew of a couple young men each year. In 1977 the Heils and their business moved from Nebraska to New Mexico, and in 1982 Mark upgraded from the MF 760s, trading for two MF 860s. Over the years, he and Dianne also added children -- a total of four (Karen, Tara, Bradley and Kimberly) who grew up in the harvesting business and spent their summers on the roads and in the fields. The family and the harvesting business moved from New Mexico to Kansas in 1989. The decades since have seen the business gradually making the shift from the conventional machines to rotary models, and today Heil Harvesting runs two Case IH machines (6088 and 7088 models) along with support equipment, as well as a couple Massey 860s that operate mainly in fall crops. Son Brad and his wife, Lauren, have joined the business, as has daughter Tara, turning Mark Heil Harvesting into Heil Harvesting, LLC. In addition to operating the Case and Massey combines to harvest crops ranging from wheat, barley and corn to millet, amaranth, wildflowers and grass, we also own two MacDon swathers and offer swathing services. Heil Harvesting also occasionally rents out headers, combines and tractors. If we can help you or answer questions about your swathing or grain harvesting needs, or if you’re interested in our equipment rentals, please contact us.

10/28/2026

And this one is headed back to Kansas, hopefully to do some more swathing!

People keep asking us if we're done for the year, and the answer is that we just don't have any idea. We may be done. We may not be done.

We often talk about swathing being a feast-or-famine occupation. It's true in two senses. The first is that sometimes there is absolutely no work available for us to do (famine) and other times there is far more work available than we can do (feast). The second is that when we are in famine in terms of work (nobody needs a swather), it's because everyone else is feasting in terms of work (The crops are great! We don't need a swather!), and when everyone else is in famine in terms of work (The crops are terrible, and we probably should just swath this.) we are feasting in terms of work (Many people need us to swath for them!).

We don't know whether we're headed into feast or famine -- we never do. The most likely crop for us to be swathing at this time of year is failed milo. And this is where things get tricky. We only have work right now if someone's crop has failed. But we never hope anyone's crop fails. Not ever. We don't like to see failed crops, and we don't believe in wishing misfortune on anybody.

But regardless of our feelings on the topic, the fact remains that there have been some tremendously difficult growing conditions this year. Remember back to June, July, August, and even well into September, when large areas of the Plains saw 100+ degrees and no rain day after day? It is inevitable that there will be failed fields out there as a result of the heat and drought. We didn't create this situation, but we hope to be able to step in to help producers whose crops failed turn a bad situation into at least a less-bad situation. We can't turn a failed milo field into a 100 bushel-per-acre crop, but we can help salvage the forage so you can at least get something out of the field.

10/27/2026

It's time to load up the swathers and move them out. This one is headed to the dealership for a little repair work on a previous repair that turned out to be not quite right. It was functional, but now that we no longer need to be running this one, it's time to get the problem fixed.

With proso millet season completed, we're looking for our next work! If you have corn or milo that failed due to the heat and lack of rain this summer and you'd like to swath and bale it, get in touch with us. Both failed corn and failed milo make excellent forage for livestock, and hay is selling well right now. It's not as good as harvesting a good crop, but it can be a lot more profitable than doing nothing with a failed crop. We don't have balers, but we know people who do. We don't buy or sell hay, but we know people who do!

10/21/2026

Sunset on the 2026 millet swathing season. We are always sad to see the season end, but it can't go on forever! Our millet swathing season turned out far better than we had anticipated. The late-summer rains that saved the millet crop saved our season, too. We're so thankful it worked out this way.

And now it's time to load up the equipment and head back to Kansas, and wait for the next phone call. Who knows what we'll do next?

Maybe what we'll do next is come to your fields! If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.

(If you follow along, you know that very little of what we put on this page happens in real time. We've been done swathing for about two weeks now.)

10/20/2026

Approaching sunset on the 2026 proso millet swathing season. We're in our last field.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we're done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/19/2026

Shadows are growing long on the 2026 millet season.

Why are we even doing this? The crop isn't fantastic, the season is getting late ... and the millet is worth from $15.50 to $17 per hundredweight, or $7.75 to $8.50 per bushel. So, even if the millet is only yielding 20 bushels/acre -- and most of it is better than that -- well, you can do the math and figure out that it's a whole lot better than $0 per acre. And that's why we're doing this. No, it's not the best crop ever, but it's certainly still worth harvesting.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we're done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/17/2026

This proso millet is dry enough and mature enough that our farmers could direct cut it (harvest it with a combine, without it being swathed).

They could, but they can't.

They can't because, like everyone else, they can only be in one place at a time, and right now our farmers are extremely busy drilling the last of their 2027 wheat crop. Here in the high altitudes of central Colorado, it is past time for the winter wheat to be in the ground. The rain was very helpful, but it also delayed planting progress by 10 to 14 days. Planting next year's wheat crop is everyone's top priority right now, and they won't be focused on anything else until that is finished. And this is why we have a job: Our farmers have their own swather and have their own combines, but they'd have to clone themselves to run them right now.

Having us swath the millet keeps it safe in a windrow until our farmers can get their planting finished up and get the combines in the fields. What's happening here is that we are buying them time while reducing their risk exposure. Once the millet is swathed and laid down in the windrow, it's pretty safe from wind and hard rain that would knock the seeds out of the head. The farmers can finish planting wheat and get to the millet harvest whenever they can get to it without worrying too much. In fact, some farmers consider millet in a windrow to be almost like millet in the bin. Yes, it's still in the field, but it's not going to get knocked out of the head and lost -- and millet seeds are extremely mold/decay resistant, so even if the windrows get rained on before the combines arrive, they're going to be mostly fine. If winter arrives early, proso millet can lay in the windrow through the winter, be harvested the following spring and still be fine. That is not desirable (everyone prefers to harvest their millet in the fall!), but it is not terribly uncommon.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we're done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/16/2026

Night swathing. We haven't worked as much in the dark this year as we have in the past. We can't say we're really sad about that. We greatly prefer to work in the daylight. Everything seems to take longer in the dark, and the end of the field seems much farther away! It just hasn't worked out this year that we've run in the dark -- the situation has been that we've finished a field just after dark and can't move to the new one until the sun is up (for safety reasons), or we've been in fields that have been complicated with sharp draws and little surprise ditches, which make running in the dark risky. However, the days are getting shorter so there are fewer daylight hours to run in, this field was allowing us to run in the dark, and we are really needing to get finished here in central Colorado. The millet is beyond ready to have been swathed and the forecasters are talking about big changes in the weather. The time for swathing millet is growing very short.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we're done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/15/2026

The day before the alternator quit, the bearing went out of the tensioner for the engine belt. The day after the alternator quit, the reel drive chain broke and the reel stopped turning. Do breakdowns come in threes? We don't know, but we're hoping this is the end of our little streak!

The reel drive chain was completely worn out. We'd never had any trouble with it before, so we hadn't messed with it. But everything eventually breaks ... At first we thought we'd just repair the chain and finish out our season with it -- we are really very close to done with our millet swathing work. Then we discovered we didn't have the right size of connector link in our array of chain repair supplies. Since we were going to have to make the 40-mile drive into town to get a new connector link anyway, we bought new chain while we were there and replaced the entire chain. That 40-mile drive turns a minor breakdown into most of an afternoon of missed swathing. Inconvenient!

We discovered while replacing the chain that the reel drive sprockets are becoming very worn. The reel runs now (actually runs much better than it had been running; clearly the chain had been a problem for a while). It will be fine for the remainder of the millet swathing season, but we'll definitely be revisiting the reel drive area for more thorough repairs this winter -- on this header and on our others, because if one is wearing out, the others surely are not far behind.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. We're now done swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

10/14/2026

We've been very blessed this year with generally excellent performance from our equipment. Aside from a few smaller repairs -- a broken belt on one of the 30-foot timed knife drive headers back in triticale swathing season in May, various sickle guard/section replacements, a roller motor with a shaft problem, things of that nature -- we've been able to just turn on the machines and have them run. If you've ever run equipment, you understand that things often don't go that way. When they do, it's fantastic! We have been both very thankful for it and really enjoying it. You may remember if you've followed along here for a while that this definitely hasn't always been our situation -- for example, there was the year we had electrical problems with the engines on both of our M155 swathers that caused them to randomly die, and then refuse to restart, throughout that year's entire millet swathing season. So frustrating! We do maximal maintenance during our offseason in hopes of reducing the number of breakdowns we have during the season, but the reality is that things don't break unless you're using them ... which means that no downtime at all during the swathing season is a completely unrealistic goal. But it's still our goal!

However ... the alternator on this M155 started making some weird squawking noises off and on, and then one morning when we started the swather, it sounded like a sickly goat. The bearings were going out. A change was absolutely necessary. We had one on hand -- actually it was one we had removed during the aforementioned electrical problems with the swather engines a couple years ago, when someone suggested that maybe the problem that was making the engines die was in the alternator. That led us to try replacing the alternator, which did not resolve the problem, so we ended up with a spare alternator. So, we shut the swather down, replaced the squawking alternator with our spare, and continued on.

We know we'll soon be looking for more fields to put our swathers in. Proso millet season doesn't last forever! If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that failed crop go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.

10/13/2026

Blue skies and progress ahead. We're getting closer to the end of our proso acres. That's good (though we're never happy to see the season end). The millet didn't stop maturing during the 10 days or so of wet weather -- it wasn't dry, but it was maturing. Most of it is approaching full maturity. That means the heads are very fragile, and the seeds are just looking for reasons to shatter out of the heads and scatter on the ground. Rain or strong wind at this point would be very bad news.

(These Facebook updates don't take place in real time. In reality, we've just finished swathing millet. If you have some failed corn or milo that you're wanting to swath and bale this fall, get in touch with us. Don't let that forage go to waste! We can leave tall stubble and/or standing strips to catch the snow and help with wind erosion.)

Address

Ulysses, KS
67880

Telephone

+16203534236

Website

facebook.com

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