The new harvest progress report puts national corn harvested at 88 percent complete and soybean harvest at 95 percent done. In Michigan though it is a different picture. Corn harvest is at just 52%, 14% behind the five-year average, and soybean harvest has reached 83%, almost at the five-year average.
Grant Reiff, Southeast Michigan District Sales Manager for Dairyland Seed agrees progress has been slow.
“We’ve had wet corn and wet soybeans because of 6 weeks of early drought in May and June,” he said. “It’s delayed emergence this year and with the Canadian Wildfire smoke there’s no real way to quantify what that did to the crop, but we do know that it slowed it down. We know that it hurt us as far as growing degree units, but all of that being said, the yields have truly been remarkable considering what the crop went through.”
What do those numbers look like?
“So far, we’ve seen a lot of soybeans in the 65-to-70-bushel range. There has been a lot of corn up over the 200-bushel mark. There is a lot of variability out there because the rains were variable this summer as well.”
Still, there was significant progress in the last week and Reiff says that’s part of an overall increase in harvest pace.
“With the above normal temperatures that we’re looking at this coming week here in Michigan we are expecting to see a very busy harvest week.”
Soybean harvest is well on the way to complete, but corn is behind due to both high moisture levels and some disease.
“There’s just a lot of corn out there and almost all of it’s going to need dried down this year, so the lines at the elevator are long,” Reiff told MAT. “Fortunately, Dairyland hasn’t had the issue in our products so far, but there are guys out there that have had some vomitoxin issues and so they’re having to be careful with that and possibly blend some loads so that they don’t get rejected. But Dairyland has been very fortunate with not much damage and vomitoxin in our grain.”
Reiff has details on the Dairyland 2024 lineup of new products including new Enlist E3 soybean varieties, and a 0% interest offer until the end of the year. Hear the complete interview here:
