2026 was a record-breaking year, but not in the way farmers had hoped. According to Brad Mason, a Field Agronomist with Pioneer, April and June were among the top-five wettest months on record, followed by one of the driest July’s in history. August brought another round of excessive rainfall, before the season ended with an unusually warm, dry stretch and very little solar radiation. With a year of so many weather extremes, Mason stated harvest offered a closer look at how the crops handled the conditions.
“As we were going into corn harvest, specifically at the end of September, there weren’t many corn diseases out there. So, stalk integrity, leaf integrity should have been good. Well, rainfall has a funny way of causing crown rots and stalk diseases that maybe aren’t visible. Corn was hanging out at twenty-seven percent and you didn’t really want to get after it,” said Mason.
The extended wait for corn to dry down, followed by a sudden shift in weather, created additional challenges for farmers as harvest progressed.
“Then all of a sudden we went through a spell where we got heat and we went from twenty-seven percent corn to seventeen percent or fifteen percent corn in some cases. Those stalks have gotten significantly worse. We had this corn hanging out that was too wet, then it dried down, and of course when it dried down what was ready, soybeans. Now, everybody went to cutting soybeans for two weeks, three weeks, whatever it took. As they are coming back to corn or still in corn, they are finding corn stalks that are in really rough shape,” Mason added.
While no two growing seasons are the same, farmers use those experiences to help make informed decisions as they prepare for the next.
