Hoosier Crops Stacking Up Nicely Compared to Other I States

Silver crop tour

Soybeans early SeptemberLabor Day weekend was a chance to hit the roads through all 3 of the I-states for one Hoosier agriculturalist, and he told HAT this week that crops here are the best he saw. Mike Silver is a grain analyst and marketer with Kokomo Grain.

“The crops here in Indiana look as good as anywhere, better than most, but I did see a lot of good crops on that entire trek, all the way to Mason City, Iowa and then down 30 miles south of Rock Island, Illinois, across back over to Peoria and then I-74 to Lafayette. A lot of good crops.”

He said much of what he saw was through the windshield of course, but Silver couldn’t help but make some stops during the family trip.

Soybeans at sunset“I shucked back some ears of corn and did some kernel counts and there are some big yields out there. Now you get north of I-80 in Iowa in particular, the obvious lateness of the crop due to the excess moisture they had early in the planting season, beans are lagging development there compared to here in Indiana and across most of Illinois. They can ill afford to have any kind of a frost up that way. Early frost certainly would cause some damage up there, and there are some signs of stress from excess moisture. There is some de-nitrification that’s showing up in some of the corn.”

There now appears to be some probability for an early frost to occur.

“It was not confirmed in the European weather model but the GFS model did show that there is some probability that we could have an early frost maybe as much as two weeks before the normal frost date, and certainly that would not bode well in the northern part of the Corn Belt.”

Silver says Indiana farmers wouldn’t sustain too much damage from an early frost, although it is certainly a bullet better off avoided.

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