While things haven’t returned to the optimistic times of early spring, rains this weekend may help salvage some of the crop for farmers in the northern part of the state. Winnebago County producer Wayne Johnson says more than a half inch of rain fell on his fields over the weekend, and that will temporarily slow the deterioration.
“It’s never too little too late, the corn is filling kernels and so it can use any refresher that it can get, and so it will help with test weight on corn, so the question is how much and none of us know. But on soybeans the next three weeks, soybeans will start blooming again,” Johnson says.
Iowa Highway 9 is about where the fields start showing more green than brown and it’s where farmers like Johnson believe they will still harvest something, although not what they had hoped just a few weeks ago. “For me in my area, around Forest City I think it’s probably dropped below that 140 bushels an acre average. I’m saying that we’re losing two or three bushels per day on yield — and that’s just totally my shooting from the hip — so we got a half inch, that probably saves us for another two days,” according to Johnson.
Johnson says he considers himself lucky because several of his counter parts in central and southern Iowa are chopping their corn into silage for cattle feed or in extreme cases, have begun fall tillage, completely plowing under what had promised to be millions of dollars.