Despite a weather-beaten growing season across Indiana, USDA raised eyebrows by bumping the state’s projected average soybean yield to an all-time record 63 bushels per acre—up from 62 bushels in the August crop report.
Purdue Extension soybean specialist ‘Soybean Shaun’ Casteel breaks down the surprising figure on the latest edition of the Purdue Crop Chat podcast from Hoosier Ag Today.
“I’m shocked to go to that level,” Casteel says. “However, there are amazing looking beans out there.”
Across early-harvested acreage, combines are already chewing through surprisingly robust bean fields.
“We’ve got some northern Indiana guys that are pushing earlier maturities, and I’ve got some southern guys that are running,” Casteel explains. “We’re hearing some and seeing some numbers that are 80, 85, 90s, and higher than that. And so there’s more fields to go that are every bit of that, and maybe even more.”
Casteel’s earlier personal benchmark sat close to trendline at 56.5 bushels per acre, well below USDA’s aggressive forecast. While he stopped short of offering an official revision, Casteel acknowledges that Indiana fields have the horsepower to hit USDA’s mark if conditions hold together.
“I know I put a number that’s way lower than that, and just having that sense that, boy, we’ve had just a rough season, and we’ve had the holes in the fields and everything else,” Casteel notes. “But if we got the clay knobs, we got the sand ridges that now have plenty of moisture—I mean, you do the percentages, it could still flip it a little higher.”
Even with high-yielding pockets, Casteel urges farmers to remain diligent with scouting, cautioning that variability and green stem syndrome will challenge combine operators.
“The green stem syndrome is definitely going to be coming out on some of these fields that had something that’s causing arrested seed fill or aborting,” Casteel warns. “And so we’re going to have some of these fields that have greener stems, and they’re going to be hard to chew through. There’s going to be some that are just lodged with heavy rains and winds, and they’re just going to be a mess. And so it’s either let’s go ahead and take them out while we can while we’ve got warmer temperatures, good sunlight. If we keep on waiting for them to get, ‘crispy brown,’ it’s going to be the middle of October and it’s going to be a tangled mess.”
USDA will provide its next updated state-by-state yield estimates in the monthly Crop Production report on Friday, Oct. 9.
