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View from the Cab: That's a wrap


Kent's field view one day last week / CIFN photo.

That’s all folks. We finished the 2019 planting season last week and it feels good.

Everyone will remember 2019 as the year which started off wet and stayed wet for a long time. Some of us were lucky enough to get out in the field the week after Easter in late April before several weeks of rain delayed corn and soybean planting to late May and early June.

We pushed it pretty hard the past two weeks with long days and short nights but it was worth it. The crops went in the ground well and the rains came once the seeds were in the ground. It amazes me how fast newly-planted corn and beans start poking through the ground this time of the year. It’s a little different than corn trying to grow in cold soil during April.

A few of our beans were planted prior to corn this year and some of our corn didn’t get into the ground until early June. That tells you how strange of a spring we have been experiencing. Time will tell how these crops do during the summer and how harvest will go in the fall. I just told someone the other day that we could be out harvesting on Thanksgiving.

Our friends to the north are probably still trying to finish up planting if they haven’t already. Those farmers have had it much worse than we have this spring and finally got a decent weather window to get something done. The major news networks picked up on the severity of the lateness by sending crews out to the fields of northern Illinois. You could see farmer interviews on the Fox Business channel and hear them on CBS Radio News.

We feel a little better about that corn we put in the ground as corn prices received a boost last week after the USDA report was issued. The agency cut corn production estimates because of flooding, planting delays and several prevent plant insurance claims. I hear there are more fields than we think that did not get planted at all this spring.

USDA has the national corn yield average at 166 bushels per acre down from previous estimates of 176. In fact, total corn production could drop to a four-year low. In Illinois, USDA forecasts the 2019 winter wheat harvest at 560,000 acres which is the same as last year. The winter wheat yield is forecast at 65 bushels per acre, down a bushel from 2018. Production is expected to reach 36.4 million bushels.

(The View from the Cab blog is powered each week by Petersen Motors in Fairbury)

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