The corn and soybean harvest moved ahead quickly in the last week. The latest U.S.D.A. crop report shows 20-percent of the corn crop was harvested last week and 17 percent of the soybeans. That puts the bean harvest two days ahead of normal — marking the first time all season soybean progress was ahead of the 5-year average.
Pam Johnson farms with her husband in north central Iowa ’s Floyd County. She says she’s thankful that the weather has been favorable at the end of the season after the way it started. The spring was cold and wet spring — leading to a very small planting window — and to get the corn in Johnson says they planted both night and day for three days and the beans didn’t go in until June.
“It’s been a struggle all the way along, and then of course, mother nature shut the rain off in August,” Johnson says. But Johnson says they’re now
really pleased that they’ve had a long growing season. “We were afraid of all the things that could happen, we would have an early frost and we have not, so the weather has been good to us at the back end of the growing season and we’re pleasantly surprised by the yields that are out there despite the weather,” according to Johnson.
Fifty-five percent of the corn has now been harvested, which is 5 percentage points behind normal. Moisture content of all corn in the field was estimated at 21-percent while moisture content of corn harvested was 19-percent. The soybean harvest is now 87-percent complete.