(Lakefield, Mn.)– All of the wet weather continues to add up to some big headaches for area farmers, especially those that still have corn to get into the ground. Jim Nesseth of Extended Ag Services in Lakefield estimates about 95 percent of the corn has been planted and that about 25 to 30 percent of the soybean crop remains to go in…
“It’s at a standstill right now. The ground is full. Soils are saturated. The challenge for a lot of our producers is that the fields that are left are probably the fields that are poorer drained or lower lying, you know, areas in those fields and so it’s going to take a little while for this to dry up.”
As far as the corn that hasn’t been planted, Nesseth says producers may need to switch to a shorter season variety…
“The end of May is when you can start the deadline for when you start having some delays or penalties as far as late planting and, you know, so once you reach that point you want to be certainly switching to some earlier maturing corn. Soybeans I think we’re in pretty good shape there. June 10th is the final day, final planting date there before we have our yield penalties as far as soybeans, and so just a lot depends upon the weather and those types of things. But yeah, we’re starting to get to that point now where maturities will be certainly something to consider as far as shortening them up.”
Nesseth suspects there will be some lower lying areas that may not get planted at all…
“You know the 20/20 rule applies there so it’s 20 percent or 20 acres, whatever is less as far as prevent plant. You can do that on some of these partial fields, so I would expect there might be some of these areas that are really low lying and poorly drained there might be some potential prevent plant there. We’ll just have to wait and see. We were hoping to avoid that but just the way this weather pattern is right now it just seems like moisture seems to draw moisture.”
On a positive note, Nesseth says pastures and alfalfa fields are thriving now after being under considerable stress from drought the past couple of years. He says the challenge is finding a window of dry days for cutting and putting up hay.
