Some farmers nervous over late harvest

CEDAR RAPIDS - Despite a much-later-than-normal harvest, Eastern Iowa farmers say they are not nervous - yet.

'Concerned, yes, but I would not say nervous,” said Dennis Lindsay, who farms near Masonville.

Linn County farmer Curt Zingula said he is 'kind of nervous” when he looks at the calendar.

'At some point, you have to worry about the lateness of the season,” he said.

Though Iowa's corn harvest recently was pegged at 18 days behind normal, Buchanan County farmer Tracy Franck said his harvest is going well, even though his combine, as with many others, sat idle in the fog on Friday.

'Actually I'd say we are about right on schedule,” said Franck, who farms 2,400 acres with his father and son.

As of Thursday, he said, they had finished their soybeans and were about one-third of the way through their 1,500 acres of corn.

Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey noted that heavy mid-October rains halted the harvest for several days, putting farmers farther behind the five-year average with only 19 percent of corn and 61 percent of soybeans harvested as of this past Monday, Oct. 20.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its regular weekly briefing that day, said Iowa's corn and soybean harvests were, respectively, 18 days and nine days behind normal.

Northey said good progress was made last week, and he expects the next weekly report on Monday will show the state's soybean harvest nearly complete.

'That's good. You don't want your beans in the field in November. With the shorter days, favorable soybean combining conditions get hard to come by,” Northey said.

Farmers in much of the state, he said, have been fighting rain and wet ground, which have kept them out of their fields.

The corn itself is wetter than normal and requires a lot of drying, he said.

'That's the bottleneck,” Zingula said. 'I can combine about 50 acres of corn per day, but I can dry only about 30 acres.”

Zingula, who has about 700 of his 860 corn acres yet to harvest, said the liquid propane for a single day's drying earlier in the season, when the corn was really wet, cost $1,300.

Wayne Humphreys, who farms near Columbus Junction, said he is one-fourth finished with corn but is not rushing in hopes that he will spend less on LP gas.

'I have more patience than money,” he said.

Humphreys said he is harvesting his best corn crop ever. With corn prices much lower than in recent years, 'yields are going to have to carry us,” he said.

Ben Schmidt, who farms southwest of Iowa City, said he too is having a 'normal” harvest with the potential for a record corn crop.

'The biggest thing,” he said, 'is that the corn is just not drying down in the field” - a condition he attributes to the scarcity of warm, breezy days this fall.

Northey said the cool summer, which simply did not provide enough heating degree days to push crops to maturity in a timely manner, has also contributed to a wet 2014 corn crop.

While Schmidt and Humphreys are harvesting their best corn crops ever, Franck, Lindsay and Zingula say they are not.

Zingula said seven inches of rain the last week of June depressed his yields, and Franck and Lindsay said a dry August hurt theirs.

'It's not a disaster. We're still going to have Christmas. But we lost 10 to 20 bushels off the top” during a 25-day dry spell in August, Franck said.