Many farmers in northwest Iowa are wrapping up their first full week of the harvest with dry, warm conditions, as the rains finally stopped last weekend and the combines were able to roll into the fields without getting mired in mud.
Gentry Sorenson, an agronomist with the Iowa State University Extension, says most producers in the region are concentrating on one type of crop.
“The primary focus has been mostly on soybean harvest at this point,” Sorenson says, “and we’re seeing some pretty good harvest progress with the nice weather that we’ve had, very warm conditions which has dried out the soybean crop very quickly after the rain.”
While he hasn’t heard any reports on yields as yet, he says moisture levels are coming in around ten or 11 percent, and falling. Sorenson says farmers -are- reporting a few problems with their soybeans.
“There has been some calls regarding things such as purple seed staining on some of the soybean grain that we’ve kind of come across,” he says. “There’s also some moldy conditions with some soybeans as well. That’s kind of a white, chalky-colored mold that we see on the seed surface.”
Sorenson says farmers are doing their best to make up for the time that was lost to the rain.
“We’re probably in that probably 8 to 9%, but harvest is going very rapidly with soybeans,” he says. “It’s much greater in some areas and we don’t see a lot of harvest progress in others. Some of that could be due to the wet conditions that we’ve had and some of those fields just need a little bit more time to dry out.”
Sorenson says the corn harvest has been at a standstill in much of northwest Iowa, since all of the wet weather in late September and earlier this month.
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