IARN — Combines are already in the fields in parts of Iowa.
Extreme drought and a rare derecho combined to make things difficult for growers this year, and it’s caused an earlier start to harvest in some areas. One of those spots is west-central Iowa, according to ISU Extension field agronomist Mike Witt. He covers Audubon, Carroll, Crawford, Greene, Guthrie, Harrison, and Shelby counties.
“Some farmers have started to harvest already,” Witt said. “Some of them might be harvesting high moisture corn. I know there are some areas that are looking at high moisture corn in west-central Iowa, but also even with the moisture that I have pulled, people are going to be harvesting in the next week or two out here for corn. There will also be some soybean fields taken for grain coming up pretty quickly. Driving across the countryside, you might see some fields that look like they were harvested, but a lot of those fields might have already been taken out due to insurance.”
With the large amount of downed corn, Witt says farmers know it’s going to be a long and slow harvest season.
“The derecho was a big windstorm,” Witt said. “We’ve have had a lot of windstorms here so a lot of times we have had downed corn, but just the veracity of it was something we hadn’t seen before. And, again, we’ve had drought before out here in west-central Iowa in previous years, but just the volume we’ve had. I’ve talked with different farmers who have farmed for a lot longer than I’ve been around, and they say that this is the worse they have ever seen. I will take their evaluations on that. The two of them (drought and wind damage) coupled together, I haven’t seen anything like this in my years.”
Iowa State University Extension and Outreach offers a post-derecho resources page online to help farmers get through these difficult times.
Story courtesy of the Iowa Agribusiness Radio Network.
