USDA’s Crop Progress report won’t be out until 4pm Tuesday afternoon, delayed one day because of the Memorial Day holiday. But we can check progress around the state with the farmers we’ve been following throughout the planting season on Hoosier Ag Today’s Crop Tour Tuesday!
Let’s start in West Central Indiana where Ryan Rippy has been done planting now for a couple of weeks. He had some very important business to take care of to start this week.
“After watching the Indy 500, the kids challenged me to a Mario Kart Grand Prix. I won’t say who won this morning, but I will say that Alex Palou and I might have more in common than you might think! I’m getting ready to head out to look at the later planted corn and soybeans on our farm just to make sure that the stands established well with the hope that everything’s looking good and we can get both the corn and bean planters dropped, cleaned up, and put away later on in the week. We’re also planning on starting post-herbicide applications on corn hopefully tomorrow.”
As we head east to Delaware County, Jenna Scott explains that they’ve been doing more than just planting crops on Cox Farms in Gaston, Indiana.
“We were fortunate to get our corn crop in before the rains put us back out of the field with only about 5% of our beans planted. But we took that opportunity to host Indiana State Department of Agriculture Director Don Lamb here at our greenhouses where he took a look at the devastation we experienced after the April 2 tornado we had. He talked to us a little bit about how our greenhouses provide plants for producers throughout the Midwest and how we impact Indiana’s agriculture landscape. We were happy to host him and speak about the challenges that row cropping farmers experience, as well as specialty farmers experience, and were happy to have good conversations with him. We’re hoping to get back into the fields today and get a lot of our soybeans done, but we’ll see how it dries up. Hopefully this week will be good to us and we can get a lot done.”
Denise Scarborough is in northwest Indiana’s LaPorte County where their commercial corn and soybeans have all been planted.
“We were very blessed last week and received about an inch of rain that was very much needed, so it gave us a little time off in the field, but we were back at it this weekend trying to get some male and female rows of seed corn planted, and hopefully we wrap things up within the next week or two.”
And last but not least, let’s head south to Dubois County. Ferdinand, Indiana is where we find J.R. Roesner where he and others have been feeling a bit behind.
“This past week, we did have some more rain that kept us out of the field until late in the week. We were able to get back in the field over the weekend. We are getting close to finishing planting. Hopefully a few more days and we will have planting wrapped up. We also began side dressing nitrogen on the corn and also doing a little bit of post spraying. Crops that are up here look pretty good for the most part. Hopefully we continue to get good weather throughout the growing season.”
We hope for continued good weather for our farmers as well. Be sure to check out Hoosier Ag Today Chief Meteorologist Ryan Martin’s Indiana Farm Forecast each day in the HAT Podcast and by clicking here. Hear Hoosier Ag Today’s Crop Tour Tuesday below!
