The wet spring weather has forced some farmers to shift their planting from corn to soybeans as the beans have a shorter growing season than corn. But Grant Kimberley with the Iowa Soybean Association says the shift doesn’t solve all the problems of a late planting season.
“This is really worse than last year’s drought, it’s really worse than the 1993 flooding, it’s worse than the farm crisis of the 1980s. And this year that’s been the case where most of our crop has been planted in June and we still have probably 20-25 percent of our soybeans left to plant, and we will have many acres of corn fields that will not be planted at all. We will have to take prevented insurance coverage on ’em,” Kimberley says.
He says once the beans get planted, then farmers have to worry about the ground being too wet. “Soybeans tend to not like what we call wet feet, that means we don’t want wet soil for the roots,” Kimberley explains.
A plant with “wet feet” is more likely to have problems growing. “It is very susceptible to various soil funguses and other diseases, that really hurts the productivity potential where corn may do a little better in some of those cases, but that’s certainly a challenge,” Kimberley says.
Fungus and disease can lead to lower yields come harvest time. Kimberley and his father farm near Maxwell in central Iowa. He says they’ve always had a crop in the ground by the end of May but this year planting may stretch into the summer.