Mother Nature has been quite kind to our Indiana farmers this harvest season. Many years we’re hoping to have harvest wrapped up by Thanksgiving. This year, many will be done before Halloween!
There is still some work to do in Southern Indiana.
“Yields are coming in actually much better than expected on some of the later corn,” explains Dubois County farmer and National Corn Board member J.R. Roesner. “Hopefully we’ll finish up here in the next few days. We are getting some rain today (Monday), so hopefully as soon as it dries up, we’ll be able to get back in the field and get harvest wrapped up.
“I’ve also been very active on the NCGA (National Corn Growers Association) front, working through the government shutdown and a lot of trade issues that are going on right now. So, it’s been a very busy week, but we’ve been able to make good progress and we’re looking forward to the end of harvest.”
In East Central Indiana, Jenna Scott from Cox Farms Incorporated in Gaston says last week was a good week in Delaware County.
“We had a great week last week getting in the field, getting a lot done. We blew through a lot of acres last week. So, this week, we should finish up our last couple of fields and be done with our harvest. We’re overall happy with our yields. Obviously, some fields were better than others regarding when they caught rains, but overall, I would say about average.”
In West Central Indiana, Ryan Rippy of Rippy Farms has been wrapped up with soybean harvest for a few weeks now on his fields in Montgomery, Fountain, and Tippecanoe counties. He wrapped up corn harvest last Thursday.
“Things turned out really well, and I was really pleased with how everything yielded and how smoothly harvest went. I’d say probably the last 25% of harvest is left in our area, so I would say in the next 10 days to two weeks it’ll be pretty well wrapped up. Our focus shifts to fall tillage on our corn stalks and some burndown applications, herbicide applications. We strongly believe that success in the ‘26 crop starts this fall, and we’ll be working on doing things that we think will set us up for a more successful spring.”
Indiana Soybean Alliance chair Denise Scarborough farms in LaPorte County. She is approaching the harvest finish line as well.
“We started cutting our double crop soybeans the end of last week, and that’s gone through the weekend. It’s nice to have some sunshine and a little bit of breeze to get those dried out. With our commercial corn, we should get back to that once we get our double crops done at the beginning of this week. Yields are doing better than anticipated given how dry we were this summer. We are heavily irrigated on our farms, so that did definitely help us this year. We’re definitely enjoying seeing some of the leaves changing and more crops coming out of the ground. Cover crops are coming up really nice, along with our wheat.”
