AURORA -- Thud, clank, bang. Thud, clank, bang.

Corn tumbled in the wagon Wednesday as Ranor Hoffman slowly churned through the field. The symphony of noise, along with the roar of the

diesel New Idea harvester, permeated the rural countryside near Aurora.

To most Iowa farmers, the wrong kind of noise while combining means something is amiss. For some reason, unwanted cobs might be joining kernels in hoppers.

For Hoffman, the din is by design. He's one of the few Iowa farmers who still harvests corn on the ear.

Using a picker -- even a six-row, self-propelled monster like Hoffman's -- is more time-consuming and labor intensive than compared to a combine, which picks and shells corn in one process. Hoffman can harvest about three acres an hour. A modern combine with an eight-row head, however, can gobble up eight to 10 acres.

Combines also can unload on the go, while Hoffman needs to stop when a wagon is full and hook up an empty one.

Beyond those factors, a bushel of ear corn takes up about 2.5 cubic feet compared to 1.25 cubic feet for shelled corn. That means a lot more loads and trips to empty.

Hoffman offers a method to his madness.

"There's no better feed than ground ear corn in Iowa. Drying costs are zero," he says.

His family has a 150-head cow-calf herd and sells about 60 fat cattle a year.

In Iowa, farmers picked corn on the ear by hand -- and later by machine -- for decades. Most mechanical pickers harvested one or two rows at a time.

The practice fell out of favor in the 1960s as combines became popular and harvest got quicker. Livestock feeding practices changed, too, and grain farmers didn't have to shell corn to sell.

Hoffman, who combines as well, knows picking on the ear is rare these days. But the farmer -- who has two degrees in economics from Iowa State University -- said he wouldn't pick 25 acres if there wasn't a financial benefit.

"It works," he said.

George Cummins, a crop specialist with Iowa State University Extension, estimates most farmers will pay about $100 per acre to dry corn this fall. A colleague and a beef specialist, Dale Thoreson, adds that cattle need a certain amount of roughage in their diet to perform well.

Cobs provide that. Ground corn offers cattle 20 percent fiber compared to 3 percent with shelled corn. That means another form of roughage should be added to shelled corn, Thoreson said.

"Once you add the normal vitamins and minerals (with ground corn), you've got a fundamentally complete ration," he said.

Still, Thoreson concedes Hoffman is a rare breed.

"I haven't seen a picker in two or three years," he said.

Of the 12.5 million acres of corn harvested for grain this year, ISU experts believe the percentage picked on the ear is easily in the single digits. Farmers in the Amish community, however, predominantly pick ear corn.

Finding a corn picker in good working order or corn crib to store the commodity can be a challenge, according to officials. Many of the ancient harvesters have been scraped.

Corn cribs are mostly wooden, slatted structures, though some are wire mesh. Either way, the structures allow air to circulate, naturally cooling and drying the corn. Many cribs, though, were torn down through the years as they became obsolete and deteriorated.

Labor requirements are the biggest reason for the downfall of ear corn. Dean Van Note, a Hoffman farm employee, knows this all too well.

After unloading a wagon of corn in a decades-old crib, he points to an area where corn burst through the sides and spilled into a walkway so narrow he has to turn sideways to get in.

"It can be a pain in the (butt)," Van Note said. "But the cattle love it. If it wasn't so labor intensive, I'd pick it all."

If that were the case, harvest might take awhile. Yields near 200 bushels per acre were common this year.

Van Note doesn't need a fancy yield monitor to tell him it's a bountiful corn harvest. He just looks at the sides of the corn crib.

"They're bulging all right," he said.

Contact Matthew Wilde at (319) 291-1579 or matt.wilde@wcfcourier.com.