Despite severe weather and freezing temperatures, Indiana’s corn and soybean planting did progress this past week.
In Monday’s USDA Crop Progress Report, Indiana corn is 42% planted and 19% emerged. Hoosier soybeans are 44% complete and 20% emerged. While the numbers still look good, that doesn’t mean that all things are well.
“Last week we did have a pretty good hailstorm in certain areas of Dubois and Warrick counties,” JR Roesner, a farmer from Ferdinand in Dubois County, tells HAT. “It looks like we did receive some crop damage, mainly to soybeans. I’m not sure how much damage or if they’ll need to be replanted yet. We had a little bit of frost [Sunday] night, so we’ll see where we get with that. Other than that, we’re just getting going on some side dressing, also some post spraying, and trying to get Congress to pass E15 year-round legislation.”
Roesner has been doing that work on E15 as part of his duties on the National Corn Board and the Indiana Corn Growers Association.
If you head straight north from there, you’ll eventually hit Rippy Farms in Fountain County. Ryan Rippy farms there and in Tippecanoe and Montgomery counties. He says they’re still dealing with a significant storm from last Monday.
“We are currently still too wet with this cool down that’s really slowed down progress of drying out. We were able to get finished planting corn before the rain. We got the soybean burn down finished up last week and did get about half the corn burn down done in the last week. We actually caught a pretty good hail event in that storm last Monday night and had about 20% of our beans that were up that just got completely destroyed with that hail, so when it gets dried out here we’re going to have to replant those beans and finish up with the little bit of bean planting we’ve got left.”
Cox Farms, Incorporated near Gaston has seen their progress come to a halt as well due to the weather.
“We had some lows. It looks like our corn that was up made it through that okay and our beans look like they made it through okay, but as far as what’s still in the ground and hasn’t come up yet, we’ll just have to see how it goes,” explains Delaware County farmer Jenna Scott. “We’d hate to replant everything that we got done but hopefully we don’t get some of the heavy rains or rains that we’re scheduled to get and maybe can get some sun and dry out a little more to progress.”
And up north in LaPorte County, Denise Scarborough says she feels like a broken record as their struggles to make planting progress continue.
“It’s been wet. It’s been cold. We had frost over the weekend. I know when I got in the truck early Saturday morning to head off to a livestock show with my kids, it was 28 degrees. We did get our first seeds of corn in the ground. We’re getting ready to start planting seed corn soon, so we wanted to get a little bit of commercial corn, and we did get some soybeans planted this last week. Today (Monday) is an awful nice day but it looks like we’re going to get cold and stay cold for the rest of the week again. We just keep praying for some better weather, some warmer temperatures to help some of these seeds grow that are in the ground, and allow us to have some more days where we can string together some days of planting.”
Nationally, corn is 38% planted and soybeans are 33% complete.
