The cool, dry weather is helping Iowa farmers bring in their corn and soybean harvests quickly, but there won’t be an official U.S.D.A. report on progress due to the federal government shutdown. Near Cedar Rapids on Sunday afternoon, Bill Haerther was harvesting soybean fields which were yielding fewer bushels per acre.
“Yieldwise, they were down quite a ways from last year,” Haerther says. “Low ends, probably 35 (bushels per acre), top end, we’ve combined very few beans that have broke 50, very few.” He says his soybean harvest has been touch and go this fall. “Beans, I don’t know, it’s kind of mixed emotions,” he says. “Probably a little better than we expected. I’m kind of disappointed on some ground. I guess it just depends on when you got that tenth or two of rain and when you got it.”
Haerthur says he’s harvested only about 15-percent of the corn on his 1,100 acre Benton County farm. Some of the land is yielding 180-bushels per acre, much better than he’d expected. “Yields, low end, about 155 and top end, about 180,” he says. “We musta’ got a rain shower or two that we didn’t count on.”
He says they got very little precipitation from July 25th through just a couple of weeks ago.