Northwest Iowa Crop Conditions

Harvest is on the home stretch in NW Iowa. Dry weather persisted this fall with basically no harvest delays from rain start to finish. The warm and dry conditions pushed the harvest pace along and dried down the grain. A period of above average rainfall before the ground freezes would be helpful for next year. After the record wet spring, it’s truly amazing how dry conditions have gotten this fall. The water levels in creeks, ponds, lakes, are back down to drought levels. Nearly the entire corn belt is now in moderate drought as shown on the U.S. Drought Monitor. The two-week forecast shows more frequent chances of rain with above average temperatures sticking around until early November. It looks like there will be plenty of time this fall to finish harvest and do various other fall field work activities.

Corn yields were highly variable depending on location, soil type, and drainage. Areas farther north were not as good as the south side of this region. Overall, corn yields were good to very good outside of the farms with flooding or replanted acres. Parts of Osceola, Dickinson, O’Brien, and Clay Counties had a poor corn crop because of water issues this spring, but the south side of the region including parts of BV, Cherokee, and Plymouth counties enjoyed record high corn yields on many farms. Most of the corn was able to dry down in the field so drying expenses were minimized.

Soybean yields were less than expected on many farms across this region but especially farther north. The combination of a too wet start and too dry finish didn’t work out for the beans. The mid-summer weather in-between was ideal, so I thought the beans would still do a little better than they did. Many farms were able to reach near their 10-year average yield, so it wasn’t a disaster. However, the northern region I described in the paragraph above had well below average bean yields. Drainage was the biggest issue this year, but farms with too much drainage (light sandy soil) struggled also, so it took an ideal farm to reach the top yields this year.