In the northwest corner of Indiana nitrogen loss is the likely culprit for corn yields that are coming in right near the 5 year average for Mark Kingma. He farms in Jasper County and with all of the rain this year he was hoping to reach average yields. Kingma was in the combine cutting beans when HAT caught him Monday afternoon.
“Yield wise, I found one farm that was running above normal but most of our ground we’re close enough to Lake Michigan that we just had too much rain early and lost too much nitrogen I’m afraid. We had so much rain I think twice we had 4-5 inch rains and we were afraid of what our crop would look like. We were trying every way we could to put more nitrogen on the farm, a high clearance sprayer and things like that. It did pay off but I think in the end we still ran short of nitrogen because we lost so much.”
It is a somewhat unusual year for soybeans in northwest Indiana, but all things considered, there are no complaints from Kingma.
“They are slightly above average,” he said. “They’re shorter than normal and right now I’m in some beans that are barely knee high and they’re running about 50 bushels to the acre. It’s really amazing the number of soybeans we’re getting out of these short plants. It makes for some nice combining, but we really are barely dry enough to go but we’re going.”
He hopes soybean moisture levels will be below 14% before the semi pulls away.
Kingma is back in the fields after about a week of rain delays. Overall he is 2 weeks behind and not yet half way to completion.
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