Although area residents may be enjoying the sunshine, area farmers are looking for rain. ‘’It’s still extremely dry and the beans are pretty weedy compared to the past,’’ said Steve Halls, a young Fithian-Armstrong area farmer as he described crop conditions on his farm.
Jason Smith is another young Vermilion County farmer in the Ridge Farm area. And how are Smith’s crops doing this year? ‘’They’re pretty good until about the last month,’’ says Smith. ‘’We haven’t really had any significant rainfall in the last month.’’
Halls was asked whether it was a wet spring or conditions since then that have impacted his crops the most. ‘’We started out pretty well, and then we had some floods and had to replant some corn and a little bit of beans. Then it’s just not really rained since then. So it’s mostly the not raining, I personally think,’’ said Halls.
Smith adds it has been an up and down season. ‘’The season started out great – got everything in timely,’’ said Smith. ‘’And then we got 9 inches of rain in 9 days after that, and wanted to pull our hair out for awhile. We had to do a fair amount of replanting – maybe not as much as we expected. Got good rains in June and the first part of July – so the crops got off to a great start after a rocky start,’’ added Smith. ‘’But the beans could definitely be suffering some yield loss without some rains here.’’
Halls thinks yields will be lower than normal at his farm. And Smith thinks the USDA crop outlook for Illinois may have been too optimistic.
Smith told Tom Fricke of the Vermilion County Farm Bureau during that interview that it will easily be another month – and maybe longer – before harvesting begins at his Ridge Farm area farm. Halls says he will likely start harvesting his soybeans around September 20th.
Meanwhile both men are hoping there is no early frost this year.
[The photo is a cornfield near Henning. It was taken on Friday, August 25, 2017.]
