Farmers have planted only 5 percent of this year’s corn crop nationwide, one-third of their usual rate headed into the final week of April, says the weekly Crop Progress report. Plantings are too small to register in eight of the 18 major corn states, including Iowa, the No. 1 corn producer.
Ordinarily, Iowa farmers would have 11 percent of their crop in the ground by now. The other states with no reported corn plantings were Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota and Wisconsin. The weekly USDA report is based on evaluations by 3,600 respondents in farm states across the country.
The late start of the planting season, due to cold and wet weather, has led to speculation that a sizable portion of the corn crop will be planted later than is ideal for the highest yields and that farmers will shift some land to soybeans. In late March, USDA estimated growers would plant 89 million acres of soybeans and 88 million acre of corn, the first time since 1983 that soybean area exceeded corn. Together, corn and soybeans are expected this year to account for 56 percent of land devoted to the two-dozen “principal” U.S. crops, which include wheat, rice, cotton, hay, sorghum, barley, canola, peanuts, sunflowers, flax, sugarbeets, tobacco, potatoes, lentils, dry beans and peas, chickpeas and Austrian winter peas.
Data from seven Midwestern states show increased soybean yields when planted earlier in the spring, according to the University of Nebraska. Over the past three decades, growers “persistently shifted average soybean planting dates…to earlier calendar dates at a rate of one-half day per year.”