In Southwest Indiana there is growing concern about a very long April without a lot of planters in the fields. HAT checked in with Kevin Kalb in Dubois County where rain has fallen in large doses this week.
“We normally try to get planting the first week of April, but it kind of looks like we’re going to be at least to the last week of April right now,” he said. “I think they’ve got ten more days off and on for rain for sure and we are absolutely as saturated as you can be. From about 6:00 Wednesday morning until about 9-9:30 right around our home place we recorded between 5 ½ and 6 inches. That was probably about the most amount I’ve seen in my life in that short a period of time.”
All that rain took its toll in that short, 3-hour span.
“Well all the tile we laid in it tore all the outlets off, washed bridges out and just destroyed our rock roads. It’s just a big mess, an historical mess.”
At Commodity Classic this year Kalb was again honored as a winner in the National Corn Yield Contest, even with a late start to planting last April too.
“We were off a little bit from the previous year,” he told HAT. “We went 361 bushels per acre but with the wet spring we had we lost some stand and we know we lost some nitrogen there, but we were still very, very pleased with our yield.”
Hear about Kalb’s yield contest celebration hosted by Monsanto on a major league baseball field in the full HAT interview:Kevin Kalb-Classic 15