As far as the snow vs harvest, it makes for a difficult harvest. If you have snow on the leaves and it's anything over 15 - 20 degrees outside, the snow melts just enough in the combine to plug up all the sieves, and the crop blow out the back. Below 15 or so, things generally went OK as the ground was then froze and the snow would blow through the combine. Usually when we had those conditions, we would harvest all night, and as soon as the sun came up it was over for the day. And it takes a surprising small amount of snow on the leaves to cause problems. Snow like our halloween blizzard, well, it's just over. Corn that was still standing before that storm I'm sure suffered a huge field loss. No one was able to get in the fields to get it off until spring, and with as we as the snow was I'm sure it broke down a significant amount of the crop.
For beans it's another story. The freeze/thaw cycle with wet beans can cause the pods to pop, and drop the beans out on the ground in the field. You can't combine beans with snow on them for the same reason as above, though that usually wasn't the problem. If beans were out in the fields this late in the year, it meant they either really didn't full mature, or, the fields were too wet get in to take them. But combining beans on frozen ground is no fun either. The frozen ground rips up the head real bad. Rocks that are above the ground that normally you would just push a little bit and glide over, don't push, and instead become a fixed obstacle in the field. Been there - done all these things.
For me, the most miserable thing I ever got stuck in the throat of my combine, was a deer head. Some hunter had killed a deer, probably poached, dressed it in the corn field. My head scooped it all up and it got stuck. Stinky, slimy, couldn't break it up with the two pound hammer I had. It wouldn't back out. I ended up having to pull the head off to get it out. I'm still pissed off about it to this day.
Jen
