Andy Huston, who farms both corn and soybeans on approximately 2,300 acres in Warren County, says the recent spate of wet weather has had varying effects on crops, depending on when they were planted. On a recent drive through Iowa, Huston was surprised at the shape of the corn crop.
“We drove from Donaldson, Iowa, all the way up to Vinton. For being the Fourth of July and seeing some corn that was not even knee-high … if those were my fields, around here, and they looked like this at this time of the year, I would anticipate their yield wouldn’t make hardly anything. Once we got north of Mount Pleasant, things started improving. By the time we got to Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, they looked like they had a really good crop going.”
Huston remains optimistic about the local crop of beans and corn, despite some late plantings.
Huston said because of the wet spring, it’s always kind of a risk when you’re planting corn late in the season. He’s hopeful for a strong pollination period here over the next two weeks, especially for April corn. On the later corn, he said, most of it probably won’t pollinate until later in August.
“There’s a little bit of variable corn. We got rained out about the 14th of May and didn’t get back into the fields until the third of June. We were just planting beans then but there were some people that still had corn to be put in the ground. A lot of the corn that went into the ground in May and June, it struggled. If you planted in the middle of May, with all of that rain that we got, it was difficult for the corn to get emerged. The corn basically sufocates when it gets like that. There was a lot of replant and corn that had not been planted. So there was a lot of corn that went in the ground the first week in June around here.
