Life changes fast in the Midwest — a wet pattern that lasted from October through June has turned in to hot and dry. Locally, the places that miss the pop-up showers are showing plant stress — more so on the late-planted corn. Overall our crop still looks good, and we are hoping to withstand the heat as our corn starts pollination. On our farm, we have completed spraying until a potential fungicide application for soybeans. The only field work left is a small spot of prevent plant that n…

The pop-up showers, humidity and no shortage of heat units are pushing our crop along very well. Many farmers locally are satisfied with their crop so far, considering how this was one of the most challenging springs we have ever dealt with. On our farm, we hope to finish spraying beans this week. The weeds have already proven to be a challenge again this year, so we’re crossing our fingers.

It finally feels like summer is here. We've had some nice days to get some spraying done, and it seems like a nice stretch of weather for everyone locally to get caught up. Most of our corn is about V11 right now, with the last planting around the V6 stage, and our soybeans are at V1-V2. We completed spraying corn recently, and today we will be spraying some soybeans. Hopefully we can all find a way to take care of the weeds early and not battle them at the end of the summer.

The days of sunshine have been few and far between with having gotten several rains in the last week, but this week looks like we will see some sunshine and heat. We haven't had the flooding rains that other areas in the Corn Belt have, fortunately, as most all of the crops around here look very good. That being said, I'm not convinced that our crop is deep-rooted, and most likely wouldn't take much stressful weather to change the condition of our crop locally. We were able to get caught…

What a big difference a couple of weeks of dry weather can make. In our area, there were both corn and soybeans planted, pre-emerge herbicide for both corn and beans being sprayed, corn sidedressing and dry fertilizer going on all in the same day. It seems that we are getting a shift from a couple weeks of dry weather back to a wet pattern again for the foreseeable future. We received some needed rain this last week, but were fortunate enough to finish sidedressing and catch up with spra…

This past week things switched off from wet to dry very quickly. While in some places the ground is still wet, we already are in need of a rain. Praise the Lord that we were able to finish planting our crop and will finish side dressing anhydrous today. This has been a planting season not many of us will forget.

While the forecast continues to show no mercy, we are getting a small window right now to get some planting completed. Soil conditions remain tough to work with, but we're just grateful for an opportunity to get some more of our crop in. It's a busy time trying to be focused on getting as much done as possible, but also paying close attention to updated grain market news. We should finish planting corn today, get close to 50 percent on soybeans, and hope get started on side-dressing corn. 

While the weather forecast continues to remain ugly, we have enjoyed the corn market and temperatures on the rise. We still have a third of our corn left to be planted, and all of our soybeans as well. We're waiting on the ground to dry out to finish up corn soon, and the machines are getting some mid-season maintenance. There's a lot of moving pieces right now in agriculture, not only with our present crop we're trying to get in the ground. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out!