how many bushels?

i had noticed that the corn field by the supermarket had been harvested last month and events moved me away from it until today...i went out with an eye to trying to determine harvest lost as the combine swept the field...how much actually was left behind...so i used a usda loss calculator i found in an extension website and made an effort at a very informal assessment...the idea is to count the loos kernels in a twenty foot long section of three rows and divide by twenty to arrive at a number of bushels per acre lost...so i stepped off twenty feet ( approximately...i said this was informal ) and began counting...

in those three rows i counted two hundred and five loose kernels which has farmer brown's combine leaving behind three point four bushels an acre...what's the average nation wide...no idea..yet...more research needed...i did run across something of a problem with this...the calculator specifically said "loose kernels"...and there were plenty of those about...however...

a walk down another hundred feet or so of those three rows revealed a multiplicity of kernel...still on cobs...far outnumbering the loose ones i found...i did not have time to count the number of kernels on the cobs and make the necessary calculations...and i did not have time to walk the entire acreage to see if this pattern held true through the entirety or if, perhaps, on choosing a random patch of field is tumbled on one where the combine encountered a mechanical issue that was corrected...don't know...i do know that if it held true for the whole field there was a lot more than a shade under three and a half bushels and acre lost...the deer and birds may be happy of this..the field may be gleaned significantly by spring...even if the grain is pretty much starch and nutritionally void...i will watch as long as this snow drought lasts...and there may be more than normal volunteer corn ( if it isn't sprayed to perdition ) in next year's bean field which will be of interest to watch as well...

finally, just because i found them this way..here are some cobs that have been stripped of the grain...the reddish brown ones are from this season and the other, darker ones from 2015...the last time this was a cornfield...there i something like six pounds of nitrogen per ton of corn cobs out there...it would appear to be a slow, timed release.