Harvesting-corn (file photo)
Iowa farmers got some good weekend weather and worked hard to try and get as much grain out of the fields as they could before the predicted rain.
Linn County grain and livestock farmer, Allen Mallie, is just beginning to get his combine into his 400 acres near Lisbon and says he worries most about already wet corn and soybeans absorbing more moisture.
“This rain makes grain — but it’s for next year, not this year. And this is going to definitely slow us down,” Mallie says. “And what we don’t want is for those beans to swell up and crack the covers and then drop onto the ground. Because we don’t have vacuums to pick up all that seed.”
Even with the rain delay, Mallie is optimistic they can get the harvest completed with some dry weather. “The way we have machines that can handle such a large volume of grain in such a short time, I still feel that we’re still on track to reap a very good harvest,” Mallie says.
But other growers who have more acres to harvest are more concerned. In Linn County near Mount Vernon, Carol Branneman and her husband Jim are looking at 2,500 acres of unharvested, rain-soaked, corn and soybean fields.
She says they are worried. “It’s already the 13th of October. We only have about 25-percent of our beans done. We’d just as soon see no rain until maybe January,” Branneman says. Branneman says their priority is getting beans out of the fields as soon as possible, because the wet corn that tests at 20-percent moisture is too wet to store without drying.
“The corn at this moisture content, we’re not going to switch, we’re going to gamble that we can continue back on beans a day or two after it quits raining. Hopefully we’re be done this year by Thanksgiving,” Branneman says.
Last week’s U.S.D.A. update said progress in getting soybeans out-of-the-field is the latest in more than 30-years. The new report comes out today.