It’s been about five beautiful days of harvesting weather in a row. And even with some clouds and showers moving in from Wednesday night to Thursday, it looks like a much better October than last year’s wet one. And as Tom Fricke from the Vermilion County Farm Bureau points out, that would be great after the rather late start to this year’s harvest.
AUDIO: If we get a little bit of rain it might slow down the bean harvest for a day. Typically, you can get back into corn if it’s just a little bit of a shower, if there’s a little wind or a little sun to help dry it out. So hopefully it won’t be too much of a delay, given what’s been forecast for this week.
Fricke says during these recent perfect days farmers are making their own call about going more corn or soybeans. He says for the beans especially, they need to be completely ready.
AUDIO: It just depends on the conditions. Just because the beans look dry doesn’t mean all the leaves have fallen off the bottom of the stem, or that they’re dry in the pods either.
And while it’s a bit early for bean harvest projections, Fricke says the corn so far is showing some good signs.
AUDIO: Corn coming into elevators was a little bit ahead of what some of the pre-harvest projections were. So that was a positive note. Don’t know if that will continue with the later corn, we’ll see. It all depends, on corn yields, how the heat hit the pollination cycle on the various fields. So we’ll if that trend continues through all of the corn.
And as always, especially with all this harvesting activity on beautiful days; please watch for farm vehicles on the roads. Be patient, and be alert at all times.
