(Lakefield, Mn.)– Warm, dry weather has made for some ideal conditions for the corn harvest. Jim Nesseth of Extended Ag Services in Lakefield says it’s also allowed producers to make some great progress…
“We’ve got, you know, 13 to 16 percent moisture on most of this corn being harvested right now and standability on a lot of these corn fields have been really pretty good. We were concerned about a lot of stalk integrity we had and we haven’t had a big wind event and so most of these fields we’ve got pretty good standability and I think I think we really minimized a lot of harvest loss.”
He adds the low moisture levels means producers don’t have the additional expense of having to buy propane for drying, and that it’s also a huge time saver…
“You know when you don’t have to go through that drying process that just speeds up the harvest so much. A lot of this corn is just getting binned and hauled right to town. Cutting the drying cost, all those good things. Test weights have been good on this corn and everything just looks real positive. And then overall I think yields have been a lot better than expected. Where the heavy ground and where they got adequate rainfall, I mean we’ve got some yields that are going to maybe even reach or surpass maybe in some cases what we had last year, which was a great corn crop year. But where the ground is light, sandier soils, lower rainfall amounts, there we’ve got some disappointing yields.”
Nesseth adds most of the harvest will likely be wrapping up by the weekend, with attention then turning to tillage and fertilizer applications.
