In the spring, we heard from farmers around the state to track their planting progress. They’re back to update us on harvest progress, which is moving very quickly!
Let’s begin in West Central Indiana where Ryan Rippy has wrapped up soybean harvest on his fields in Montgomery, Tippecanoe, and Fountain counties.
“The beans were really good, probably in the top three bean yields that we’ve had on the farm. So, really happy with them. Got into corn last week, and wow, it’s been really good. With what we’ve done so far, it looks to be a record corn crop by large margin.”
And Rippy says that corn has been dry too.
As we head north to LaPorte County, Denise Scarborough says their seed corn harvest has been happening since before Labor Day.
“And we have been planting some wheat in after that, and hopefully by tomorrow we should have all of our wheat planted. We have been cutting quite a bit of soybeans. For those of you that listened to the spring version, we were extremely dry all spring and continued to be that way through the growing season. We are about 75% irrigated on our farm, so we have stayed very busy this summer irrigating, but our beans are doing better than anticipated given the growing conditions as dry as they were this year. We have not started picking any commercial corn yet.”
Scarborough adds that there have been a few combine fires in the northern part of the state due to the dry conditions, and she encourages everyone to be cautious and safe the rest of the harvest season.
Jenna Scott from Cox Farms in Delaware County says they finished soybean harvest yesterday with the exception of some replant acres they had.
“Our yields were average, if not above average in certain parts where we caught some rains, which was unexpected, but nice, due to the lack of moisture we had late in the season. We will start taking off some end rows of corn. I’ve heard some moisture points around the low 20s, and some farmers stopped harvesting corn just to let it dry down in the field.”
J.R. Roesner says they’re getting close to finishing up soybean harvest in Southern Indiana’s Dubois County. They’re about a quarter of the way done with corn.
“Yields so far have been good. Stuff planted mid-May has been maybe slightly better than expected. The remainder of the crop is yet to be seen as we had some dry conditions late in the growing season. There’s definitely been some disease out there that maybe affected the late crop.”
