Southwest Iowa Crop Conditions

Corn planting began in earnest on Monday, April 20th and proceeded at a blistering pace all week. By Saturday night, the majority of the corn was in the ground and many farmers were completely done with corn. The weekly Iowa Crop Progress
Report as of Sunday night placed the region at a little over 50% done, but that’s a little conservative from everything we’ve seen and heard. Soil conditions are the best in recent memory, regardless of soil type or area.

Soybean planting is underway with excellent progress being made this week. While the weekly crop report next week won’t show this, I’ll estimate that around 50% of the beans will be planted in this area by May 3rd.

It is fantastic to finally have a spring where conditions are great, the weather is favorable, and we’re not trying to fit in a half day here and another part of a day five days later. Most farmers are geared up to plant their corn in 5 to 7 days.This is the first time in years we’ve had that many days in succession. After so many wet springs, this year the race was on!

Does early planting guarantee a big crop? It sure can, but our research of the past40 years shows that having 75% of the US crop planted by May 10th has resulted in a large crop less than half the time. A few years it was dry and stayed dry (2012) and other years the crop was trend line yield.

Crop prices continue to slide. Nearly all the analysts we read (there are quite a few)seem to agree that corn is trying to establish a bottom. That sounded good until it dropped another 10 cents on Monday. They say the trend is your friend, but in this case the trend is down and that’s not very friendly! Cash corn is now at its “ethanolera” low. Let’s hope we’re still in the ethanol era. The fact that the $19 billion USDA bailout money includes nothing for ethanol is very concerning. Perhaps more is on the way.

We’re planned for a big crop, we have the planting conditions to get a great start
toward that goal, so we are thankful for those things.