From the Fields: Dealing with dry beans

We are making good progress on harvest. Obviously, it’s been sunny and dry and warm. I would say soybeans are 98% done in the area and corn harvest is maybe 50% complete. We were able to start with soybeans first. There was a brief pause at the end of September and then, with October being so warm and dry, they disappeared in the first couple of weeks of the month.

I think probably the first 50% of the crop was able to get harvested with moisture levels kind of where you would want them, at 11% to 13% moisture. The last half, I’m sure there were a lot of fields with single-digit moistures, 8% and 9%, which is terribly low.

The problem with the soybeans was that the 10-day forecast was always 10 days of sun and warm temperatures, so there never was any chance to get a rain event to put moisture back in the beans. At the end, we just had to harvest them at such low moistures that you lose 2 to 3 bushels an acre at that moisture versus 13%. That’s just the hand we have this year.

Wheat follows our full-season soybeans and we did plant that last week. It is just starting to emerge now. A challenge with that is that any seed that did not get good seed-to-soil contact, that did not get by moist soil, is just laying there. It will be a combination of emerged plants and plants that are just trying to germinate, for the rest of the fall. I don’t know what that will mean for the rest of the year.