Anticipation building for full scale harvest to begin across the state. Certainly that happens every year as we reap the rewards of our efforts yet this year it comes with a bit of trepidation this year as well with the dry weather and a concern for yield results. Bill Northey, former Iowa Ag Secretary and current CEO of the Agribusiness Association of Iowa, provided some key observations.
“Certainly the dry weather has made the outlook really spotty for an awful lot of folks,” Northey said. “I did talk to one of our members, our members are a lot of folks involved in agribusiness, certainly including ag retailers, those providing agronomy services, buying grain, feed mills, those kinds of things. And one of our folks said, ‘I think I have more than enough LP gas’ because I don’t think we’ll see a lot of drying going on around the state with an early harvest and the fast dry down the some of our crops have. So every year is different, certainly fertilizer prices have come down.”
As far as disease issues he says it’s been pretty quiet except for one.
“Hearing, you know, some issues with tar spot in some areas, some cases they got enough of a heads up that they could get some spraying done and stop the impact of tar spot and other places they said they didn’t really see it and then all of a sudden was there and hammered some crops so maybe we’ll know afterwards kind of what the impact was,” Northey said. “But there’s always something that’s popping up.”
Things are always changing no doubt about that and certainly will quite a bit in the next month agriculturally speaking in Iowa.
