Wild variations in the corn harvest continue to show that the impact of the summer drought depended a lot on your location. A good example is Maxwell area farmer Gary Plunkett, who raises around one-thousand acres of corn and soybeans. He watched the fluctuations on the computer yield monitor in the cab of his combine as he moved through the field.
“There we go, 307, 319, wow,” Plunkett said. “Gotta get a picture of that.” He snapped a photo with his smart phone and says this is just the second time he’s ever seen numbers in the 300’s, and the first time was earlier this season. The spikes are encouraging, but don’t erase low numbers elsewhere.
“I also got a farm around the corner there that went down really bad and it only made 125 bushel. So I need some good corn to make up for that farm,” Plunkett explains. The ups and downs in the combine are one thing. But Plunkett and other farmers say what really matters is the total yield they get from any given seed.
Plunkett was really surprised in one particular section of the land he farms. monitor. “Going through a field that had an old waterway that we planted through this year, and the monitor got up to 333, I’ve never seen anything in the 300’s before, and of course it only lasted 15 or 20 feet, but it just blew me away,” Plunkett says. Last week’s crop report showed most of the Iowa’s corn is now mature and about 40-percent has been harvested.
A new crop report will be released this afternoon.