Soybean planting – and re-planting – is underway in many Iowa counties as the state recovers from massive flooding, following a cold, wet spring. Palle Pedersen, a soybean agronomist with the Iowa State University extension, says soybean growers may have to turn to shorter-season varieties depending on where they’re located in the state.
For northern and central Iowa right now, he recommends growers shorten up the maturity group by zero-point-five to one point. In southern Iowa, he says to plant the full-season varieties through July first and then afterwards to shorten them up through July tenth.
Either way, Pedersen says soybean producers won’t be able to maximize yield potential at this late date. He says that’s also true of soybeans that were planted timely and didn’t get flooded because the spring weather conditions prevented extra pod-producing nodes from developing before the flowering stage.
"This year, we’re not going to get the nodes simply because it was so cold and wet first of all, and then second of all, we couldn’t get planted until so late," he says. Peterson points out that Iowa received 22-inches of rainfall between April 10th and June 16th – in addition to more than 59-inches of snowfall since the first of the year – all making for extremely wet planting conditions.