Harvest not in full swing quite yet

Kyle Nietfeld

We’ve seen a little bit of corn shelled and some guys are starting to cut some of the April beans. We haven’t personally done anything yet. I think we’re looking at the end of the week. There’s a chance for rain Wednesday, so that might change things. We do need the rain, so we won’t complain about it. If it doesn’t rain, I’d say by the end of the week we will be cutting some soybeans. We’ve got some green stem beans that are dry in spots and then green other areas. A rain might average the moisture out across the field. 

We just had some patches of white mold here and there in few fields. It dried off so it hasn’t really spread much. We haven’t had a significant rain here in a couple weeks. 

There’s been a little tar spot showing up here in the county and then some leaf blights, but nothing major. It came in late enough they don’t think it’s going to be a major issue on the corn yield.

We usually try some corn harvest early, but we got a different grain dryer and they’re still trying to wire it up, so I think we’ll probably start here with beans. The way it looks, all the beans will probably go, minus double-crops, and then we’ll probably run corn. 

The double-crops need some rain. They’re still blooming on top so rain would be very beneficial for them. They had a lot of potential, but with this dry weather we’ve had here, I don’t think they’re going to be any record double-crop beans like we were hoping for couple weeks ago.

The soybean fields all look really clean. There is a little bit of shattercane in the river bottoms in corn, but that’s normal. Overall, the weed control looks good.

Lawrence Onweller

We had one neighbor get started with corn because he had an early contract and he had a really good basis. The corn was coming out at 25% moisture and 200+ bushels. The guys that normally run beans in September are running beans in September and yields are 65 to 75 bushels. Most guys are happy with their yields so far. 

It looks like it should be a good harvest. I haven’t heard anything yet about vomitoxin and the yields should be good because we got those July and August rains that really made up for the dry weather we had earlier. Driving along the road, you can really see the tar spot on the edge of the corn fields. It came in late enough that I don’t think it did much to hurt the yield. 

Later this week, one field on the farm is going to be ready to go. It was an early variety of beans and then the rest of the beans are going to be ready the very first part October. We typically never ran much in September unless we had a really severe drought and then we’d run corn first. Things are changing fast. Fields are turning yellow and the leaves are dropping fast. 

As far as soil moisture, we haven’t had any big rains. We’ve got a 20% to 30% chance that we’re having rain today. The fields are dry and field conditions are really good for harvest. 

There are some weed escapes around in some fields. It depends on what chemical or chemistry the farmer used.

Jeff Magyar

Neighbors ran some early beans the other day and planted wheat right behind them. I’d say everything else is still a week away for the earliest beans. There are still some later planted fields that are not yellow, but most everything is starting to yellow up fast and drop leaves.

As the leaves come off, the beans are not looking great when you can see down the rows and see the pods. I definitely think we’re going to be yield impacted in this area. I won’t really know how bad the white mold is until we start combining it because it came late enough that the plants didn’t die from it. Most of the plants were starting to turn when it came in. On one food grade variety we plant, they want a big-seeded bean, and if you have white mold, you’ll still have a bean, but a lot of times the size of the bean will be smaller because the plants give up early.

This year we have three varieties of food grade beans. We try to finish one variety before we switch to the next. We try to get all the beans done first, unless we get a rainy spell where we can’t run beans. For corn, I like to be down to 22% or 23% moisture before we think about shelling.

About 10 miles north, they started filling silos at a large dairy. I was talking to some of the drivers for the trucks. The corn was planted in 15-inch rows and is not what they expected. It is short and thin and has weak stalks. The corn is turning quickly around here. 

Doug Miller

We’re going to shell some corn today to just see how wet it is and get the dryer going and get the kinks worked out. Then, depending on the moisture of the corn, we’ll decide how much we shell. It’ll be the end of the week before we have beans ready and we’re going to need some sunshine. We don’t have any sunshine today and we’ve got some rain coming, so we may just go ahead and stick with the corn.

Some of the neighbors have shelled corn. The moisture was 26% to 32% and he wasn’t happy about shelling, but he had some September contracts he needed to fill. What I’ve been hand shelling was about 26%, and normally it’s two or three points wetter. If it’s that wet, we won’t be shelling much more just because of the cost of drying and it just goes so slow through the dryer. If we can hit 24% or 25%, we’ll go ahead and roll. You have the least amount of harvest loss at that level.

In a good weather window, we’ll switch to beans and we and we may end up going back and forth based around the weather. Some years there’s a lot of back and forth.

We had some weed escapes earlier in the season, but there really haven’t been any new flushes. We did a lot of spot spraying at the end of July and into August. 

The double-crop soybeans are thriving with the rain. If we get rain later this week like they’re predicting, they’re going to love that.