Agricultural companies deployed harvesting crews in late August/early September for Iowa’s seed corn harvest.
Shannon Moeller, project coordinator for the Iowa Seed Corn Cover Crop Initiative, and I met harvesting crews throughout central Iowa to gain a better understanding of seed conditions/yields.
Rusty Seekins, of Waterloo, ran a Oxbow seed corn harvester through a field near Reinbeck alongside a 13 person crew. He started harvesting seed corn a couple weeks ago, and faced delays with last week’s rains. Seekins reports various field conditions with favorable yields, but he does not think “we have seen how bad it is yet.”
?(In) the area we moved into, all of the commercial corn is flat, but this field is standing good. The yield is a lot better than we expected, with the drought we had this summer,? Seekins says. ?We?ve been in fields that didn?t hardly have any corn and the yield was impacted by the lack of water.?
Drought coupled with the derecho weighed on field crops. The derecho alone made for a “unique? and ?challenging” harvest, according to Seekins.
“For the first time anybody can remember, we’re picking a lot of fields one way. That’s not uncommon for commercial corn, but nobody can remember doing that in seed corn,” Seekins says. “That’s taken twice as long to do, and (we) try to go slow and not tear equipment up.”
Aside from a slow harvest, Seekins’ work saw little change, as Pioneer hopes to harvest every seed corn field, regardless of weather-related impacts.
“Pioneer made the decision, after assessing everything after the derecho, to go ahead and go after everything they can. That’s why we are picking a lot of fields one way. To pick them two ways, you wouldn’t get anything going the ‘bad way.’ They definitely made some hard calls, and are going to go ahead and go after every field they have planted.”
