This regular feature provides an update of crop growing conditions from several farmers, along with happenings across the farm to ensure overall quality of their product.
There’s an old soybean farmer’s adage that says, “you make your money in August.”
Well, it’s August, but to make that money, farmers are going to need some timely rains in the weeks ahead. It’s hard to imagine a need for any rain after the wet planting and early growing season, but the July heat dries up soil quickly.
For east-central South Dakota farmer and Northern Soy Marketing Vice Chair David Struck, he’s gotten to the point to where he’s had to make his own rain.
“Where I’m at we’ve missed a lot of the big rain events. When everyone else was getting 10 to 18 inches of rain, we were getting four,” says Struck. “We could use some right now, so we’re turning the irrigators on this week to try to catch up.”
Struck will likely get his first taste of harvest this season in the next week or so as they get underway with combining wheat.
Struck, who chairs the South Dakota Soybean Research and Promotion Council, recently stepped aside from his operation and joined more than a dozen other South Dakota farmers on a “See for Yourself” trip to the Pacific Northwest (PNW), where they were able to get a behind the scenes and up-close look at the soybean shipping process.
“We got to see them load the soybeans on to the ship and we got to meet with the transit authority for the city of Portland,” Struck said. “It was a bit of a whirlwind tour, but we got to see a lot of the things that you normally wouldn’t get to see in the process.”
Struck and the rest of the crew also explored the biodiesel, renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuel markets in Oregon and their efforts to reduce carbon emissions using soy-based biofuels.
Across the plains to east in the sandy Swift County soils, Benson, Minn., farmer Patrick O’Leary is also getting ready to turn on irrigators. Even though the weather conditions are changing to the point where some fields need water, the after effects from the wet spring are still looming.
“The beans have been a challenge, they are all behind where they would normally be this time of year and most fields have crop-loss due to water,” said O’Leary. “At this point I would expect most fields to yield below average or average.”
O’Leary adds that although his soybean crop is much shorter than it usually is this time of year, it visually appears to have faired much better than his corn crop.
“Right now it’s a waiting game,” he said. “We’ll know what we have when we harvest it sometime in September or October.”