Fall harvest under way; corn outlook good

Fall harvest is under way in Jackson County and the corn is looking good, but there’s still a little bit of time before the soybeans start coming in, according to Dennis Holliday, agronomy manager at Jackson Farmers in Holton.

“They’re probably 60 percent done with the corn,” Holliday said of area farmers cutting and bringing in their fall crops. “We only had our first load of beans on Monday, so they’re just barely getting started.”

But the corn yields are looking good, and many farmers have been out harvesting their crops early this week to beat a few days of rain that have been forecast for northeastern Kansas. Holliday said that at Jackson Farmers, the average corn yield so far has been in “the upper 180s,” compared with last year’s average of 160 to 170 bushels per acre.

“It just kind of depends on whether you’re in the tilled ground or the bottom ground,” he said.

Meadowlark Extension District Agent David Hallauer said this year’s corn crop “has some potential to be very good.”

“Across the board, most folks are excited about this year’s corn crop,” Hallauer added.

But like Holliday, Hallauer said it’s too soon to tell on soybeans.

“There’s too much potential for variability in that crop for me to even try to predict anything,” he said.

That’s not due to late planting, which some soybean farmers in the region had to deal with due to a particularly wet spring, Holliday said.

“I don’t know that it’s affected them a whole lot, because when they finally did get the seeds in the ground, the ground was warm and the seeds came up good,” he said. “They had a lot of moisture and a lot of good sunshine, so the later-planted stuff just kind of caught up with the early-planted stuff.”

Besides, Holliday noted, soybeans have their own cycle of “drying down and maturing,” and while the Jackson County area hasn’t seen a lot of rain in the past few weeks, many beanstalks were “still a little bit green, so they were kind of tough to cut.”

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