Plant 2025: ‘Tale of two Illinois’

BLOOMINGTON, Ill. — Most of the crops are planted in the northern two-thirds of Illinois, but multiple bouts of heavy rains in the southern part of the state have slowed many farmers to a standstill.

“Matt Reardon wrote in his May 13 Field Advisor blog that it’s been ‘a tale of two Illinois.’ Depending on where you are, that’s really indicative of what’s happening planting-wise,” Kelsey Litchfield, Illinois Soybean Association agronomic outreach specialist, said of the Nutrien Ag Solutions senior atmospheric scientist to open a recent podcast.

ISA’s Field Advisor podcast featured a trio of Soy Envoys representing the state’s diverse area.

“It’s pretty tough right now. We’re about 10% planted in my corner of the state and we cover 10 counties right along the Wabash River, about two counties deep,” said Mike Wilson, ISA Field Advisor in southeastern Illinois.

Wilson serves as Wabash Valley Service Company specialty products marketing manager.

“I was out driving around yesterday and I saw corn that’s already V4, V5, and soybeans that are starting to shoot the second trifoliate. That’s about 10% of the crop. Everything else is not planted.

“I saw a John Deere planter that was stuck and they were hooking a bulldozer to it and they weren’t raising the planter up. They were planting on the way out,” Wilson said.

“Things are starting to pick up, but we still have a lot of water to get rid of. There’s a lot of water standing and we’re getting one-half to three-quarters of an inch of rain every other day. We’ve got that cycle coming out of the southeast, and until we break that, we’re just going to be wet for a while.

“We probably have 7% to 8% of the soybeans planted and 10% to 11% on corn and that was all done the first week of April and they haven’t done anything since then.”

Matt Montgomery of Chatham, agronomy education lead at Beck’s Hybrids serving central and west-central Illinois, noted that during each national election, pundits refer to Ohio as a “snapshot of all of the diversity of the U.S.”

“I would say this part of the world begins to kind of do that, too. There’s been tremendous progress in western Illinois. I bet a lot of that is 89%, 90% planted, probably even better now,” he said.

“Then you get down to Route 108 that goes through Carlinville and think about it sitting maybe 20 miles north of Route 16 as the unofficial boundary between central Illinois and southern Illinois. You get to Route 108 and it goes down to 20% to 25% planted at the end of the week (on May 10).

“You go down and start hugging Route 16 and it starts to fall off a little bit less than that, and you go over towards Shelbyville where it’s maybe 20% planted or something like that.

“It’s not quite the same situation that Mike was talking about, but you begin to sense that this part of the world is where that transition and those two different Illinois begins to happen. You have northern and western Illinois with some really good progress, then you start catching that northern border of southern Illinois and begin to see planting progress trailing off.”

Some of the earlier-planted soybeans in that portion of the state are at third trifoliate.

“As far as the progress in western Illinois, this is probably three years now that they’ve managed to be ahead of the curve. They managed to get it in pretty timely compared to a lot of other places and really take advantage of some of that early planting yield benefit or at least risk reduction,” Montgomery said.

“They have some soils that aren’t necessarily the most forgiving — not quite southern Illinois soil, but sometimes can be a little bit unforgiving — and early planting benefit is going to serve them very well.”

Ottawa-based Seth Wiley, Babson Farms Inc. farm manager, gave his observation for La Salle, DeKalb, Lee and Ogle counties, where 95% of the corn and soybeans are planted, thanks to a third-straight year of ideal planting windows.

“I would say the week prior to Easter is when the first slug of crops went in the ground in the four counties that I cover. The corn is pushing V2. The soybeans are pushing the second trifoliate. It’s looking really well,” he said.

“There was another slough of planting in the last week of April. We got rained out May 1, and by then, as a whole, it was probably both corn and soybeans were probably 60% planted.

“There was very little left to put in the ground on May 14, and I think everything will be in the ground up here by the weekend.

“We’re really sitting pretty well and pretty optimistic about the crop right now. We are drier. We could use a half-inch of rain, but everything that’s in the ground looks pretty good.”

Wiley noted some rotary hoeing the first week of May due to crusting after the May 1 rain.

“I walked some corn yesterday. I’m thinking maybe we’d lose 1,000 stand. I just don’t get too worried about soybean as long as they have a stand of at least 100,000,” he said.

Replant Information

Litchfield noted that Stephanie Porter, ISA outreach agronomist, has been fielding some questions regarding replanting soybeans.

An article is featured on the Field Advisor website that provides resources from Science for Success on the replant issue.

“There’s also some questions about herbicides, herbicide injury, environmental injury and things like that,” Litchfield said.

“In my part of the world, we’re expecting very little replant. The biggest thing on corn for me is as long as emergence is even, I’m kind of OK. It’s where it gets really patchy I’m a little worried, but if we at least get a final stand of 33,000, generally we’ll kind of let that ride,” Wiley said.

“Soybean-wise, a lot of guys are pushing bean populations lower. I think that’s kind of a trend, especially up here on most of the ground we’re working that’s kind of class A type soil. If it’s at least 100,000 stand we’re leaving it. A lot of planting population now are 120,000 to 130,000. There are some still run around 140,000.

“As we push later here, I always recommended after Memorial Day to increase by at least 1,000 seeds per day, which was kind of my old adage in ag retail.”

“I think the biggest issue I’m probably running into at the moment is this is kind of the land where high-speed discs are pretty popular, and needless to say with some rain that came in, we’re starting to see some crusting that’s making it hard. So, you did have some trimmed down corn and bean stands,” Montgomery added.

“I’d say that environmental thing has been the biggest issue that more recently pumped up, and I’d say that’s in just the last few days people have had a chance to catch a breath, go out and actually look at the crop that’s in and say, yeah, it looks like it’s had a little bit of a tough time.

“I think that’s honestly been more an environment related and some pretty broke-down soil structure that packed pretty tight when we got the rain.”

“Where we planted and water didn’t stand on it, we’ve got a great stand. We’ve got 33,000, 35,000 corn stands, 140,000, 150,000 soybean stands, and where the water stood we’ve got zero. So, we don’t have bad stands,” Wilson said.

“We either have a good stand or we have no stand. Luckily, the ground that was planted first was the first ground that was going to dry up anyway, except in the river bottoms and the sloughs.

“A farmer called the other day who treats his own seed on his farm and said he can sure tell the difference with the seed treatments we use now compared to what we’d been looking at. We’re able to save a lot of stands with a very good treatments we have today.

“I look back at the time many, many years ago when we didn’t treat anything unless it was a foundation or registered seed, and now everything gets that planted is pretty much treated. I can’t emphasize enough how much that saves us, because we just don’t rot in in the ground much anymore. It takes really serious conditions for that to happen.”