Maybe it was a bad year?

For this particular stand of corn.
I took the ATV out for a joyride today and exercise our 14 month old lab in the field behind the house. The guy who farms this had done some vertical tillage before snowfall and most of the snow has melted. What I noticed while riding was the huge amount of broken and whole ears of corn laying on top. If my M3 left that much behind, I'd have it scrapped.

Now days with wildlife it could be anything. We had very bad coon damage in a 20 acre field this year. They just tear down the stalks and go on to the next one, big holes in the field you couldn't even see the rows. Also the north headlands were real bad. I was hauling the corn away. Neighbor combines for me. Deer were terrible also. We put some drain tile in the field the other day and 5 of them ran across in the middle of the day. I was telling another farmer about the coon damage and he said in their test plot a couple of years ago they had 1 variety the coon just devastated and not much on the others. The other thing is when they come out with new numbers every year they tell you they are always better but sometimes those high yield variets fall over or drop cobs. Last thing this year we got a foot of snow November 30 and not everyone was done combining. If you tried to combine for a couple weeks you couldn't run the head down to the ground. If you waited till now, Christmas, most of the snow is gone although if you had standing corn there is probably some still in there.