Indiana Farmers Look for the Heat to Return

West central crops good

David VirginThroughout the 2013 season David Virgin has benefitted from Mother Nature for the most part. As crops head into August Virgin says he would like it to warm up again, but there are no complaints from his farm in Montgomery County in the west-central part of Indiana.

“We’ve been pleasantly blessed. Beans and corn have grown well. We’ve had rain when we needed it but the last couple of weeks our temperatures are cooler than normal. I think we dipped down to 49 degrees the other night, so good sleeping weather but not any good corn growing weather. We’re in the midst of deciding whether we want to do some fungicide or not. We’re pretty much all pollinated.”

And on a truly positive note he added, “Sweet corn is excellent so if that counts for anything we might be headed for a good crop.”

The crop dusting planes have been very busy spraying the last week in central Indiana and that does include Virgin’s area.

“We’ve got some seed corn places around us and they’ve been hitting those hard and we’ve been finding everybody that has corn after corn they’ve been hitting that hard, and we’ve been watching ours. You know you think you should be having some gray leaf but we’re not seeing really telltale signs yet. I don’t know what it would take to really trigger it, but we are monitoring that pretty close.”

In that part of Indiana pests haven’t been too problematic with a couple of exceptions, horseweeds and marestail. But those cooler temperatures are a concern.

“We are actually now starting to work on some grain facilities that we normally wouldn’t bother because we’re feeling like we better get some dryer gas stored up because if we don’t continue to get our timely temperatures we could have a wet crop to get out.”

Virgin has also traveled a good part of the Corn Belt in recent weeks and reports on what he saw in the complete HAT interview:David Virgin July 30 update

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