SW Indiana planting standstill
The rains have come to Indiana and now Hoosier farmers sit and wait to get back in the fields. This follows some recent impressive planting progress. The wait to plant again in southwest Indiana could be a week, according to Monsanto technical agronomist Matt Parmer, and that’s a week from when the rains end.
“We received anywhere from 1 to 3 inches in spots across southwest Indiana over the last 36 hours with more rain forecasted for Saturday and Sunday,” he said. “Right now we’re sitting at about 30% of the corn planted. A lot of that went in about a week ago and a lot of those planting dates are just now starting to spike through the ground. So for right now we’re going to be on hold for at least probably a week before we get back to the fields.”
Parmer said about 5% of the soybean crop is now in the ground. Overall it has been another slow start in the southwest corner of the state.
“The start of the April season was kind of cool and wet so we didn’t really get started until that middle to latter half of April. So we didn’t get a really good start even with anhydrous until about that time, but right now it’s pretty typical in southwest Indiana to get a lot of wet weather here at the end of April.”
In some areas weeds are problematic and Parmer said the spring conditions aren’t helping.
“The grasses are starting to emerge, giant ragweeds and marestail. Fortunately, we did have a break in there where we were able to start getting some burndowns on them, but with this wet weather and we’ve had some pretty warm temperatures, a lot of these weeds will start bolting pretty quick. So we’ll just have to stay on top of it and hopefully we get some dry weather to get across some of these fields that are still unsprayed.”