Farmers push through late planting amidst weather challenges and market shifts

The 2024 growing season is proving to be an exercise in adaptation and innovation for the XtremeAg farmers.

Kelly Garrett - Arion, Iowa

Kelly Garrett is a fifth-generation farmer in western Iowa. Garrett farms 4,000 acres of corn, over 1,800 acres of soybeans, and 170 acres of winter wheat.

We just finished planting corn on Monday, May 20. We have been done planting soybeans for quite some time.

There’s a lot of talk about May 20 being late for planting corn and similar concerns. However, I strongly disagree. The talk of late planting on May 20, in my opinion, is ridiculous. I don’t believe there is any yield penalty for planting corn on May 20. I would be comfortable planting full season corn up until May 25. As long as the soil is warm and moist, and the air is warm, the corn will have no problem shooting out of the ground. I think we even got a little bump in the corn market because of the planting report and similar factors.

That said, I’m happy to be done planting. I wish I could plant all my corn between May 5 and May 20, but we can’t always control the weather.

Aside from planting, we have started rotating the cattle through the rotational grazing paddocks, particularly where we took the soybean ground out of production. I have to admit, the oats and peas are not growing as fast as I would like. However, a watched pot never boils. The cows are in good shape, and I am optimistic that it will work out.

The trial I am most interested in for the summer of 2024 is not on corn and soybeans, but on this intensive grazing forage trial for the cows. It might sound strange coming from an XtremeAg partner, but that’s where my focus lies.

Chad Henderson - Madison, Alabama

Chad Henderson is a fifth-generation farmer in Madison, Alabama. Henderson Farms includes over 8,000 acres of dryland and irrigated corn, dryland soybeans, wheat, and dryland and irrigated double-crop soybeans. When not farming, Chad can be found carrying on another proud family tradition as a drag racer for Henderson Racing.

We are side-dressing now on our dryland corn. It only gets one side-dress application, and we’re applying it around V8 or V9 right now. We side-dress a little bit early on some corn to get it done before we go into wheat harvest, which is about a week away.

For the irrigated corn, we’ll side-dress twice. This is the first application, and then we’ll come back after a rain or two to do it one more time. The corn, for the most part, looks good. It’s starting to get a good color to it, and we're getting some good heat down here now, which is really bringing the corn to life.

We’re now in a herbicide spray phase. Some of the early soybeans are approaching R1, and we’re starting to see a few flowers. We’re making a foliar and herbicide pass on the 15 inch soybeans and getting them all cleaned up. 

We also have a few 30-inch soybeans that we're going to experiment with using Y-drop. We didn’t put any fertility out initially, so we’re going to Y-drop those daily to get some fertility underneath them. We’re curious to see if that's something we want to try more extensively.

The wheat is turning brown, and we’ll provide an update in the next blog about the count and yields. Overall, the wheat looks pretty good. We have a few spots that are starting to lay down from the wind and rain, but other than that, we’re ready to harvest.

Kevin Matthews - East Bend, North Carolina

Kevin Matthews and his wife, Cindy, are fourth-generation farmers in East Bend and Yadkinville, North Carolina. Matthews Family Farms, Deep Creek Grain, and Precision Nutrient Management farm corn, soybeans, wheat, and barley. 

What a tough spring it has become. We finally are over 50% done with corn and soybeans, even though last week, USDA claimed North Carolina is 98% on corn planted, obviously those claims are very inaccurate with the planters running hard. The rain keeps hitting us, but fortunately we’ve gotten four days straight running very hard 16 to 18 hours a day on those opportunities of decent soil conditions. With the wet weather our ADS tiles are paying huge dividends preventing a replant situation. This is also allowing us back in the fields much sooner than non-tiled soils.

Barley will be ready this week to harvest as well, so being stretched thin will have a whole new meaning with our crew. Our to do list on the farm this week is long:

• Post-emerge spraying corn and soybeans
• Plant corn and soybeans
• Run vertical tillage ahead of corn planters
• Scout fields and pull tissue samples
• Mid-week we'll harvest barley using a stripper header on our S690 testing the new Estes XPR 3 Concaves*
• Repair one last field from flood damage. There's about two acres of two foot deep of sand to push out of the field

Hours are long, weather is tough, please remember safety, and don’t let stress knock you down!

*XtremeAg was provided this product for free to test on Kevin Matthews’ farm.

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