Northwest Iowa Crop Conditions

Weather has not allowed for much harvest activity. Frequent rainfall and cool weather has been the trend lately.Recent rainfall was enough to bring our season totals back up to near average total rainfall amounts overall. The good news, subsoil moisture levels are in much better shape now for next year because of this fall rain. Therespectable yields that we are expecting this year were made possible by soil moisture reserves. The bad news,crop progress and harvest are falling behind schedule.

Soybean harvest started in early October (which is about normal timeline), but progress has been very limited over the past 10 days due to rainfall and poor drying conditions. This is not a serious problem, however head shatter losses tend to increase when harvest is delayed and when soybeans go through multiple wet-to-dry cycles. Yield reports so far are a little better than expected.

Very little corn has been harvested yet. Most corn is still well over 20% moisture which is nearly unchanged from Oct 1st. If we don’t get good drying conditions in the second half of Oct, we are likely stuck with wet corn to harvest and pay for drying. Typically November doesn’t give us good drying weather, and the daylight hours continue to shrink as we move toward winter. We still don’t have a good handle on corn yields, but we know they are going to be highly variable from farm to farm and from one area in a field to another.