Farmer Perspective: So, the corn is done... but we are not.

Since my last post, we’ve hit a nice milestone for 2019—we finished corn planting! On Thursday, May 30, we spent part of the day at a meeting, learning about prevent plant options. We really didn’t want to go that route, but we felt we needed to be informed as June 5th loomed, and we still needed to plant around half the planned corn acres. 

It was a beautiful day, until the drive home from the meeting, when it rained on us while we inspected some field conditions on the way home. But it didn’t rain a whole lot on our sandier farms North of US 24.

So Saturday, after sitting idle for a week, the plan was to go to our farms furthest from home to see if they were dry. This meant switching to soybean planting, which we didn’t really want to do, but we didn’t have corn fields that were ready to roll. As I prepped the planter at home, Dad headed North to see how things were. He was stopped in his tracks at the next furthest farm, as he saw that it was fit enough to plant corn. So we loaded up and pushed hard on corn there all day.

We finished that up Sunday, then headed back South, past the shop, to finish one 50-acre field I had planted 12 acres of before our last rain delay. After that, it was a trip a little further South to hit 46 and 33 acre fields to polish off planting corn.

On June 3, we wrapped up all the corn. It took some extra road time and running around, but it’s done.

Sitting at the prevent plant meeting it wasn’t looking like we would get corn in by our June 5 insurance date. Not a huge deal, but we started to talk about maybe the following week it would be time to pull the plug on corn and switch to more beans. We really pushed the envelope on a few acres mudding in the corn, but at this point we are placing our bets on being all planted may pay off well (literally) in the long run, if areas worse off than us continue to have more rain. We had to skip a few impassible spots, but those only added up to a couple of acres. The way things are going, they’d probably fill up again and drown the crop anyway. 

So corn is done, but we are not. As it stands, the first field we planted this season back on May 10th is still the only soybean field that’s planted. Because we always double crop soybeans behind winter wheat, we feel we still have the whole month of June and then some to get ourselves to 100% planted.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll have to take a break sidedressing corn to go cut wheat!

The views expressed in this article are the author's alone and not those of Farmer's Business Network, Inc., its affiliates or members.