The soybean harvest is 98 to 99 percent complete in parts of northwest Iowa, well ahead of schedule.
Iowa State University Extension field agronomist Joel DeJong says things went very quickly due to the exceptionally dry conditions. “You don’t make money when you’ve got eight, nine, ten-percent beans, so that wasn’t a good thing,” DeJong says. “It went smoothly. A lot of the fields I heard went from the mid-50s to the mid-60s and then as we went north into the rainfall areas, into the lower 70s.”
The region’s soybean yields would have been better if only they’d gotten more moisture. “You look at a lot of the rainfall totals, eight, nine, ten, 11 inches behind normal since April 1st, so it’s pretty tough to get a full crop when that occurs,” DeJong says. “I think most people are pretty pleased with the yield we got, considering how little rain we got.”
DeJong says the corn harvest in northwest Iowa is about half-way through and the yields are also mixed. “We’re seeing anything from 12% moisture corn up to 18, 19% moisture corn, from what I’ve been hearing lately,” DeJong says. “Most of it’s in that 14, 15 range. A lot of it’s really pretty dry coming out of the fields.”
Next to the lack of rain, DeJong says the biggest problem faced by northwest Iowa corn farmers was corn rootworm damage — which greatly cut into yields.
(By Jerry Oster, WNAX, Yankton)