Guessing Yield Especially Hard this Year
The great guessing game is on to guess what corn yields will be. While this is far from an exact science, this year it is especially difficult. Purdue Extension agronomist Shawn Casteel calls them Swiss cheese fields, fields with large holes where the crop did not get planted or got washed out. He says this year there are a lot of them, “There are a lot of crops that look really good and have high yields, but the question remains how many of those fields have swiss cheese in them with big holes and washed out spots that will impact overall yield.”
He said crop tours often do not pick up on how many holes there are in a field, “You drive a field and you cannot tell how many holes there are and how many parts were replanted 3 and 4 times. You have to get up in the air with a UAV or fly over in a plane to see all the holes that will impact yields when the combines start rolling.”
Casteel says the large amount of replanting that took place this spring will be an issue at harvest, “You have pockets of fields that are at different stages because they were replanted.” He said, at harvest, some parts of a field will have low moisture while others will have high moisture and the crops will take longer to dry down because they were planted at a much later date. He added, with soybeans, as the combines roll, growers may find some part of a field that will still be green.
The Pro-Farmer crop tour will begin moving across the Corn Belt next week, listen for reports on this station sponsored by Seed Consultants.