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Summer was almost non-existent, and the hottest weather of the
year arrived in late August, and even then only lasted a week or so.
Spring was cold, following an unusually cold winter leaving a deep
permafrost, soil temperatures were slow to rise, making corn
planting late.
Throughout the summer, the land was blessed with rain like it hasn’t
seen in the last few years, but as fall approached the blessing
became a plague. With each day that mud rolls on the combine tires,
farmers are becoming more anxious about what this, once to be
thought best year in a decade, will turn out to be.
As the week of October 20th began, the U.S. Department of
Agriculture said Illinois corn harvest was at only 23 percent
complete, with soybeans jumping ahead only slightly at 32 percent
complete. However, in that same week, Farm Journal Ag Web reported
soybean harvest was 53 percent complete with the corn harvest
lagging behind at only 31 percent complete
Though genetically days to maturity for corn have shortened a great
deal over the last 50 years, days to maturity for soybeans remains
much the same. With corn planting being late this year, the wet
weather, high moisture content on corn, and Sudden Death hitting
many central Illinois soybean fields; the end result has been that
beans were ready first this year.
While wet weather may not be what the doctor ordered this fall, the
fear of a warm sunny week in mid-October was just as concerning for
soybean producers. “As the sun warms and dries the pods, they will
pop open,” one farmer feared, “and when they do, then it is beans on
the ground, not in the hopper, and there goes your yields.”
While downed corn, if it happens can still be harvested with
directional combining, or even hand gleaning, when a soybean hits
the ground, its potential for harvest is lost.
So, the bottom line is, the beans that haven’t experienced sudden
death syndrome, or been attacked by Cyst Nematode, are doing well.
Up until the third week in October, they were just hanging out in
the field. But with warm, dry weather predicted that week, the fear
of many became popping pods.
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Put all these facts into one bag and what we see in the field is that soybean
harvest is taking precedence over corn harvest. So, are we seeing a flip in the
harvesting trends? Or, is this just history repeating itself. Some of the more
mature farmers in Logan County will cringe to recall the harvest seasons of the
mid-1970’s. In a couple of those years, farmers gave up their Thanksgiving
holiday for cold turkey sandwiches in the field, and the thing they wanted most
from Santa was to be able to say that harvest was finally finished.
Undoubtedly everyone is going to be wishing for a dry November so they can put
an end to this year’s up-side-down harvest.
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