Northwest Iowa — It looks like farmers in northwest Iowa may have dodged a bullet. The cold temperatures we’ve been experiencing don’t appear to have been cold enough long enough to cause much crop damage.
We talked to Iowa State University Extension and Outreach agronomist Joel De Jong, who tells us that while this may have caused some crop stress, it probably didn’t kill too many plants in our area.
(as said:) “We know corn and soybean plants really don’t develop when the temperature they’re experiencing is lower than 50 degrees. And you can about guess the last few days… It’s been well below 50 degrees and then we’ve had some frost in the mix, but the fortunate part is I can find as I’m walking field today… I can find some corn plants that were frosted. Most of them just looked like they’re yellow in color, could use some heat, could use some sunlight, but it doesn’t look like we saw significant stand loss… at least in the places that I’ve been. And soybeans — we don’t have very many soybeans emerged. A couple of fields I was in… they look like they’re going to be okay also. I think it created some stress for us, but I don’t think we’re going to have any major loss from the frost this weekend.”
De Jong says progress-wise, thanks to some favorable weather, northwest Iowa farmers are doing well.
(as said:) “In the northwest corner, we’ve done really well getting the corn planted. There’s not many fields of corn that are left to be planted. And you know, we’ve actually had quite a few that have been up for a week, even though they haven’t made much progress since then. Soybeans, you know, we continue even over the weekend — I saw a few planters going. We have some neighborhoods that are done. We’ve got others where we’re probably 60% done. So it’s a great progress for this early in the month of May, but we’d certainly like to complete that pretty soon.”
According to the latest crop report issued Monday afternoon, in the northwest crop reporting district, 96 percent of corn is planted, with 49 percent of it emerged. It says 83 percent of intended soybean acreage is planted, with 6 percent emerged. It says, for the most part, we have adequate topsoil moisture, with 78 percent. Subsoil moisture is also very good with 87 percent of samples reporting adequate subsoil moisture in northwest Iowa.
