Huge planting progress with great weather last week

Lawrence Onweller

Corn and soybean planting got finished up on May 19 early in the morning and the spraying is caught up. Then that night we got four tenths of an inch of rain, so that was just about ideal. Stuff sprouted really quickly because it’s been warm enough. 

It seems like in this area there’s almost more corn to go yet. There was quite a bit of corn planted around here the middle of the week. Guys in this area have been planting beans ahead of corn but there’s not a lot of acres left to go up here yet. The planting conditions were really nice last week.

Planting took around six to seven days total for both corn and soybeans. If the weather cooperates, with the machinery we have nowadays, we are able to do that. The equipment we have compared to what we used to have is amazing.

To me, it’s about a week and a half late. We used to plant more corn and beans in April than we have in the last five years. It seems like it’s trending later and we don’t get the as much planted early as we used to. If you look over the last 10 years, I would say planting dates this year were about a week and a half later then we used to typically finish.

This year it was rain holding things up and not necessarily cold weather. They always used to say planting anything after May 10 starts to lose yield. Then I had a guy telling me the other day that it’s anything after May 15 losing yield, but we’re also having warmer falls. I can’t remember the last time we had a frost in September. Now it’s almost November before we typically get a killing frost, so that’s kind of how things are shifting and I don’t know that being later planted really hurts you on yield now. The year we had to prevent plant, the planting season went way late and there were really fairly decent yields for as late as it was planted. The hybrids are a little tougher now too. 

Jeff Magyar

In our area we got a little bit of rain Saturday afternoon, a quarter to half inch or so. It helped soften the fields up. We actually got very dry and we were back in the fields Saturday afternoon shortly after the rain. The crops are probably three-quarters done in this area and planting progress is moving quickly.

We planted some beans April 14. I was getting pretty nervous about them, but the little bit of rain we had Saturday was enough to get them out of the ground. The emergence was to 90% to 95%, so I’m really happy with the way those look. And now, barring a major breakdown, we should be done with planting in two or three days. We should finish with the food grade beans tomorrow and corn after that. As you go a little further north, they are just now getting rolling good. They have a little wetter, tighter ground.

Our area has been unbelievably dry this spring and we’re not used to those types of conditions. We will typically have pounding rains. When we are trying to get beans to emerge, normally we have only three- or four-day windows to work with in the field before we get a pounding rain and we get emergence problems. This year it’s been nice rains, generally a quarter or half inch rain. With the corn and the beans coming up in the last week, it has been very favorable weather for getting crops started. We’re seeing good emergence with warm soil temperatures.

As soon as we get planted, the fields are sprayed. Hopefully for those first batches we got adequate rain to incorporate the sprays into the soil.

I did see some bean leaf beetle damage. That is the problem with early beans that are the first beans around. We’ll see that sometimes, but it is nothing the plant will not come out of. Hopefully everyone is having a safe planting season. 

Doug Miller

We’ve had really good progress. We finished both corn and beans up last week. We’ve had really good conditions. This week we will be scouting fields for weeds, insects and emergence issues. My son Charlie is going to finish spraying the wheat fungicide and we’re just going to do some summertime projects around the farm. The wheat crop is looking good too and we’re planning to put in some double-crops after the wheat.

We’re pretty decent now on moisture. It seems like about the time we start to get a little dry, we’ve been catching a rain. I hope that lasts all summer. We had some rain-out time in there where we had to sit and wait to plant until things dried up. Once we dried out, we got rolling and got done.

It’s always nice to keep rolling and get it done rather than have a long and drawn-out planting season that goes into June, which we’ve done plenty of that in my career. I’m glad we got it wrapped up in such good conditions. 

I was driving around through the countryside Saturday and I saw a lot of fields that haven’t been planted yet. That might be the bigger operators that just haven’t got there yet. For us, everything is out of the ground except for the beans and corn we planted last week. That’s all we’re waiting on because everything else was planted a week or 10 days earlier, two rain events ago. I think everything looks really good. It’s a promising start. Now we’ll see what Mother Nature throws at us this summer weather wise.

Kyle Nietfeld

Last week was beautiful in our area. North of us, they had a little more rain the weekend prior so everybody there was a little bit slower getting started. We started the day after Mother’s Day and we had anywhere from a half inch to nine tenths last Friday evening.

We’ve only got 40 acres of corn and 40 acres of beans left to plant, so we’re almost done. Before the rain, it was ideal conditions all last week. We were not going around any mud holes out along the woods. Everything we planted was 100% fit everywhere.

I talked to some people who had some earlier stuff out. There’s a little bit of replanting, but some of it looked really good too. Some of it was a little bit weaker. We’re glad we waited a little longer. Seven days, eight days after we planted this, I think we’ll be seeing it out of the ground. Maybe by the end of this week we’ll start being able to row this corn. We’ll probably wait until tomorrow afternoon to finish up. It will probably only take 2 or 3 hours. The ground is all worked down and it is ready to plant.

The start of the season is looking as good as we can get. We’ve got some heat now and everything should be up and growing nice and quick and won’t be lagging behind. I truthfully think this corn we planted this last week will probably catch up to some of the earlier stuff, just because the conditions are so nice. We’ve got a lot of heat units coming and some dry weather, so we should be off to a good start.

There’s no rain in the forecast, so I was actually talking about whether we should go out and start spraying our corn. We got a pre-emerge down on all the beans and that was all activated here Friday, hopefully, so we should be setting pretty good there. I think we’re going to hold off on spraying this corn a little bit until we see a rain event coming up and put our residual down to get it activated.