Indiana farmers made major strides over the past week as cooperative, open weather allowed combines to roll at near full capacity across multiple regions of the state.
In Northeast Indiana’s Allen County, Roger Hadley reports a dramatic turnaround in progress following weeks of weather-related delays.
“Last week when I reported, we were lucky to be 30% done—probably 10% in the Woodburn area, but around the county closer to that 30% area,” Hadley says. “Starting on Saturday of last week, people finally started getting into the field again, and we’ve had one heck of a good week this week, other than the foggy weather that came and some days we could only run three, four hours. Other days we’ve been able to get in by noontime, and one night we could run probably till 10, 11 o’clock at night. But it’s been shorter running than normal. I would guess now our area is probably 70% to 75% complete, if not 80% before the day is done today. Yields have been surprisingly good. I’ve heard a lot of ranges—anywhere from 50s up to almost the 80-bushel mark for field averages.”
Across Northwest Indiana, LaPorte County producer Denise Scarborough reports strong headway on soybeans while operations prepare to wrap up late-season wheat seeding.
“We’ve had a lot of soybeans cut in the area,” Scarborough says. “We’ve been able to get some wheat planted, hoping to finish that up this weekend. We haven’t gotten into our commercial corn too much—most of the specialty crops have all been wrapped up now. Soybean yields are kind of all over the place. We do something interesting on our farm where we interseed soybeans into our wheat, so it’s a double crop, but not a true double crop. We started harvesting those this week and have been extremely surprised with our yields. Overall, our soybean yields have kind of been all over the place—the good, the bad, the ugly—but definitely surprised with our double crops that we’ve got coming in.”
In West Central Indiana, Ryan Rippy officially finished cutting crops across Fountain, Montgomery, and Tippecanoe counties on Wednesday and transitioned immediately into post-harvest field operations.
“We’ll probably start tillage next week, waiting on getting some fertilizer on before we do that, and then probably follow that with some fall spraying,” Rippy says. “Keystone Cooperative has been busy putting fall strip-till down for us—they’re getting pretty close to getting that wrapped up on us now.”
Rippy notes local elevator operators expect regional harvest activity to be largely completed ahead of Halloween. Looking at final operational numbers, Rippy says crop results proved to be a mixed bag compared to historical benchmarks.
“After kind of having a chance to look through the numbers, after having three record corn crops in a row, this one definitely felt like a disappointment,” Rippy explains. “It’s not a disaster, but definitely not what we had the last three years around here. The bean crop, in contrast though, was the fourth-largest bean crop we’ve ever harvested.”
Eastward in Delaware County, Jenna Scott at Cox Farms Inc. in Gaston reports that absent a brief equipment breakdown, their operations would already be wrapped up for the season. With two to three days left of cutting, Scott sees the finish line near for the surrounding agricultural community.
“The fields that aren’t finished are looking like they’re beans that got planted really late into June, or some double-crop beans, and you know, people are just out working on their acres, getting everything in—a lot of corn,” Scott says. “Overall, our corn crop has been kind of like the beans: average. The fields where it held water obviously had more damage than the others, but overall, an average year—nothing to really write home about, but we’re still happy for it, happy to have a safe harvest, and hope everybody else does too.”
