Harvest Underway

October 4, 2021

My favorite time of year has begun and no, it isn’t just because of playoff baseball, college football and cooler weather. Harvest brings with it a mix of emotions – nervousness, anticipation, and finality. Even in years when a bumper crop might not be expected, the culmination of the farmers’ labors in the fields always feels worthy of reflection and thankfulness.

As I write you today (on 10/4/21), harvest here in our pocket of Central Illinois is approximately 30-40% complete. There are a lot of bushels yet to come in and the final chapters have not yet been written on this 2021 crop. Even so, here are some early takeaways for those of our readers who are not intimately involved with monitoring harvest progress:

  1. Corn is solid, not spectacular. This obviously isn’t a judgement on all fields, but the basic feedback I have heard on the corn harvested thus far is “pretty decent.” I don’t think we will see any records this year.
  2. We all have short term memory in some regards, and it is important to remember that we had an extremely wet spring and an incredibly damp June. Many farms were altogether replanted and even more had holes that needed to be “spotted in.” Sometimes it is easy to forget the hand Mother Nature dealt months prior, but initial harvest chatter suggests we are seeing the result of struggles related to precipitation early in the growing season.
  3. Drainage improvements and/or rolling topography have been welcomed. Some growers have indicated that even though they had flat rich soils on some fields, unless adequately drained, harvest on some of those fields has underwhelmed. Subsequently, farms of lesser quality but with a bit of topographic roll have exceeded expectations. The ability to move the water from the wet spring has had an obvious correlation to early yields.
  4. Don’t count out the beans! Almost every year I am surprised by bean yields. While there are fewer bean results than corn results as of October 4, early signs point to bean harvest being better and more satisfying than corn.

There are still a lot of unknowns as it relates to the 2021 harvest. It will be exciting to see how things shake out when the dust literally settles. One certainty is the farmers are out there working extremely hard not only for their own families, but also for the greater good. While everyone in agriculture eagerly awaits the final harvest results, I hope we will all take time to reflect and be appreciative of what’s being done out here in our rural communities.

Written by Luke Worrell – Managing Broker, Accredited Land Consultant, Accredited Farm Manager