Northwest Iowa Crop Conditions

This is my last crop progress report of the season. Harvest was mostly finished by the end of October, but there are just a few corn fields yet to do around the area. The extremely dry weather stretch starting in late August finally ended last week with widespread rainfall totaling one inch or more. The deeper soil profile remains mostly dry, but it was an improvement. The two-week outlook is warm with above average chances of rain, so maybe we can recharge the soil moisture before the ground freezes. There is still a lot of fertilizer and manure to apply this fall. We were concerned about the dry, hard soil conditions for anhydrous ammonia (NH3), but that should work better now as long as we don’t get too much rain! We tend to swing from not enough to excess when it comes to rain.

For the most part we were happy with the corn yields this year and mildly disappointed with the soybean yields. Of course, there was a wide range of exceptions to that. The northern part of this territory, especially Osceola, Dickinson, and parts of O’Brien and Clay counties struggled with yields because of saturated soil this spring. Places with light soil struggled from dryness late in the summer. There were some very impressive corn yields in parts of this territory.

The grain markets seem to have found some positive momentum, but the upside is probably limited. The low prices have fueled an improvement in export demand, which is exactly what should happen in a free market. However, the future of Chinese demand for U.S. corn and soybeans is uncertain at best. Brazil had a poor start to their soybean planting season but have since caught up. The price outlook based on supplies / carryover may be little more friendly to corn compared to soybeans at this time.