Many firsts for farmers this year

DWIGHT – There were plenty of firsts for Dwight farmer Matt Boucher this year, including drying soybeans in the bin.

Farmers typically wait and let soybeans dry in the field but this year, Mother Nature did not do her job of letting those later crops dry down.

“We ended up talking to a lot of folks and got good advice on how to do this and ended up combining beans around 16 or 17 percent. They combined really well,” said Boucher.

Boucher put the beans into a 30-foot dryer bin with stirators in it. Between wet corn and propane shortages, 2019 has been full of challenges for producers. Boucher looks forward to starting all over again with a new year on January 1.

While harvesting fields this fall, Boucher observed both good and bad days. Corn yields revolved around planting dates. The first of his June planted corn performed better than that planted in May, although the next round of June planted corn did not do as well.

“That kind of defies normal logic and what we’ve seen in the past,” Boucher said.

If the weather would cooperate for a couple of weeks, Boucher hopes to strip till and apply fertilizer. He even hopes to plant cover crops as he has planted right up to December 1 in the past without any issues.

Boucher ended up planting several prevent plant acres into various mixes of cover crops for area farmers in the summer, traveling from Newark to the town of Iroquois and everywhere in between.

“The cover crops all came up well as we had nice rains afterwards.”

Anyone with questions on cover crops or other ag needs can e-mail Boucher’s business, Potential Ag, at potentialag@gmail.com or call him directly at 815-258-1503.