Rains keeping crops going

Doug Miller

Right now, things are looking really good after our dry spell this spring. We’ve been getting plenty of rain, probably a little too much, which has been making it very tough for the boys to finish baling straw. They’re running behind stripper heads and they said the straw quality has been very good. We got wheat harvest wrapped up and the yields were great. I heard of wheat yields anywhere from 90 to 122 bushels around here. 

We got all the double-crop beans planted, but it was about a week later than normal. I’m spraying double-crop beans this morning because we got a lot of weed pressure since the rain. We’ve been spot spraying beans for the last week or so. We will start the fungicide on the beans tomorrow and they should be finishing up fungicide on the corn.

No-till beans are shorter than where we did some form of tillage. Where there was tillage, I think the beans got off to a faster start. 

We’re just about all tasseled and corn is looking good. It has been fairly consistent. The weather we’ve had during tasseling has not been bad at all. We’ve not had really any days over 90 yet so we can’t complain and we’ve had adequate moisture through tassel and pollination. 

Hopefully we can keep the corn standing. We had a storm go through here a week ago and we had a bunch of corn leaning, but it seems to have come back. I did hear of some green snap issues further north in Fayette County.

Lawrence Onweller

We’ve still had really spotty rains. The rains have been the biggest issue. A week and a half ago or so we had anywhere from four inches in one field to four or five tenths in another one in a matter of five miles or so. The four inches in that short amount of time was really hard on the beans. They were probably a little over a foot tall and it drowned some of them out. We just drove by that field last night and it still looks pretty ugly. The majority of the fields could have used a little more rain but just that one field of ours in that two-mile circle got that kind of rain. When I first looked at the rain gauge, I was not sure that it was right and then I talked to some neighbors that had rain gauges out just to double check that the rain gauges were dumped out before the rain. It was an accurate measurement. 

They’re starting to spray for tar spot. It’s supposed to be sprayed right at pollination and each field is different and then in each field it really varies. Some is actually pollinating and in the same field you can have just a little over knee high corn. There is corn that’s got the tassels out and pollinating and then parts of the field that doesn’t have any tassels out. It is really random. And we’re still 10 to 12 days behind where we should be right now. With all the unevenness, dry down in the corn is going to be something this fall. 

The beans aren’t really tall. Normally you drive around and you just see pretty fields. My wife and I took a crop tour last night and that’s not the case this year. I think a lot of it is just about the conditions that the crop was planted in and the lateness of planting. 

Jeff Magyar

Last Wednesday night we’ve got anywhere from an inch to an inch and half of rain. That’s the most rain we’ve had at one time. Most of the corn is tasseled or tasseling. It’s not rolling up anymore from the dry weather. We bought another week or so with that that rain. The beans dramatically improved. They’re closing the rows now and the stands are starting to fill in but if you know the topography, you can look out and see every hilltop is thin. 

There are three different stages of growth in the same field of corn. Fields with some of the later planted corn have plants tasseling and plants two weeks away from tasseling. I’m sure there’s going to be some pollination issues. I’m concerned with the spots where pollination started earlier. Most of the stand came up after two or three weeks when it received some moisture, that won’t be as critical. In the best-looking parts of the field that came up first I’m concerned that there won’t be enough pollen to do adequate fertilization. 

All the food grade beans were sprayed a second time. Normally we spray around a fourth of them a second time but this year all of them had to be sprayed. They’re looking pretty good now we but we had a lot of foxtail coming in. That’s pretty easy to kill in the food grades but some of the broadleaves were much more difficult to take care of in the second pass. 

Everyone around here was pleased with wheat harvest. I’m hearing about a lot of 90s and 100s out there. Oat harvest will happen this week. I know in this area a lot of guys are scrambling for straw because a lot of big dairies from New York have come in looking for straw acres. 

Kyle Nietfeld

We just received anywhere from six to nine tenths of rain on Thursday, so everything’s looking good for now. We’ve got a lot of heat coming, so hopefully here in the next week or so we’ll catch another shower to keep everything going. We’ve been getting just enough to get by it seems. We don’t have any excess moisture that’s for sure, but it seems like we just get enough small little showers just keep everything growing.

Everybody I’ve talked to says this year they had some of the best wheat they’ve raised, good grain yield, good grain quality and the straw was phenomenal. Everybody was really impressed with it. There are lot of double-crop soybeans going in after the wheat. Some people are saving some ground back to haul the manure to get by through the summer. There are a few tile projects going on too, but the majority of the wheat fields are double-cropped around here. We received a couple tenths of rain after most of them got planted so they’re up and starting to look good.
Around 50% of our corn is tasseled out and will be starting to pollinate here this week. The heat is not going to be the best thing for it but we’ve had worse. The other 50% I would say would be tasseled out here by the end of this week. The corn is looking good but we will be short on moisture with the 90s coming this week and this is a critical point in the growing season for the corn. 

Soybeans are looking a little bit better than they had been. With these little rains we’ve been getting, they’ve really taken off here in the last couple of weeks. I think they’re not going to be super tall, but we’d rather not see them get too tall. Between knee high and waist high is plenty high. A lot of them are getting to be just shy of knee-high right now and the rows are all filled in. We’re done spraying all of our first crop beans and we couldn’t be happier with the way with the weed control is right now.