Over half of Iowa’s corn is in the ground

by | May 5, 2016 | 5 Ag Stories, News

by Ben Nuelle

57 percent of Iowa?s corn crop is in the ground. We are ahead of Indiana who has only 30 percent but behind Illinois with 66 percent. Missouri is in the lead with 89 percent planted.

Farmers are now only a day ahead of last year but that is not the biggest concern on a southeast Iowa farmers mind.

Rain halted much of planting across Iowa last week. Kurt Hora grows corn and soybeans near Washington, Iowa in the southeast.

He says his concern besides the recent rains is profitability.

?Hopefully that corn markets came up some in the last month or so again. We?d like to see a little bit more get on there for the corn producer. We don?t want it to get to get to high again like we were a few years ago. I think that makes it too difficult for our end-users. We want to be at a profitable level where they can also be profitable.?

Another thing on Hora?s mind is timeliness.

?Timeliness on the rest of the applications. We?ll go through with a side dress application also. We only put about 50 percent of the nitrogen on prior to planting that we think the crop is going to need and we can adjust that with our side dress when we go in there and kind of see the condition of the crop, what the forecast is, and if we need to adjust that up or down with our side dress application we can.?

He says Weed pressure is always a concern.

?There?s a lot of good chemicals out there with multiple companies we got that we can work with to go back and catch any escapes that we may have. And then mother nature, make sure we get favorable weather throughout the year. We sure don?t want too much rain and we don?t want too little either.?

When I spoke with Hora last Friday he had 80 percent of his corn planted.

7 percent of corn has emerged in Iowa. Cool and wet weather had slowed emergence and reports indicate many tile lines were running steady.