45% of Indiana corn is in the ground and 41% of Indiana soybeans are planted. It’s time to go on the Hoosier Ag Today Crop Tour. While those numbers are ahead of the 5-year average pace, this Dubois County farmer is feeling behind.
“This past week has been much like the previous weeks,” says Ferdinand, Indiana’s J.R. Roesner. “We’ve had on and off rain throughout the week and have not been able to get into the field. We were able to get into the field on Sunday to get a little bit of planting done. We were able to get back in on Monday morning for a couple hours before we got rained out again. It looks like we have maybe a couple more chances of rain this week, so we’ll see what happens. We’re starting to get very far behind in this area, and we really need some extended dry weather to complete planting.”
If you head to the northwest part of the state, they’ve been missing a lot of those rains.
“We’ve been extremely dry again and had a very productive week last week finishing up our commercial corn,” says LaPorte County farmer Denise Scarborough. “Today and this week moving forward, we are going to start planting seed corn. A lot of specialty crops are grown in northwest Indiana with all the irrigation we have. I know that tomato planting also started in our area this week.”
East Central Indiana has struggled to get planting done this spring as well.
“This week, we were finally able to get into the fields and start planting some corn,” says Jenna Scott from Cox Farms in Gaston, Indiana. “We’ve seen a lot of people out in the fields in Delaware County getting some fieldwork done and finally started planting, which is nice. We’ll be about 20% done by the end of the day today with our crop. We have a few chances of some rain here the next couple days, but hopefully we can miss it and keep progressing.”
In West Central Indiana, the story is the complete opposite. Farmers there are nearing completion.
“I am actually pulling into the last field of corn right now getting ready to unfold,” Ryan Rippy told Hoosier Ag Today from the tractor cab. Rippy farms in Tippecanoe, Fountain, and Montgomery Counties. “I should be done planting corn hopefully here in the next hour or so, and we are getting close on beans as well. We’ll probably be done with beans by early afternoon. We got dried out about Thursday or so, things started happening again in this area. There’s been a lot of planting progress since last week and over the weekend. I would estimate we’re probably somewhere around 75%, maybe even 80%, complete. If we don’t have a lot of rain, I would imagine by the end of the week, we’ll probably be about done in this area.”
Tune in to the Hoosier Ag Today Crop Tour radio segment below.
