It’s been a weird year for North Dakota farmers. The 2019 crop got planted extremely late, thanks to an extremely wet spring. 2020 hasn’t looked much better. Some farmers are still trying to harvest last year’s corn crop while running out of time to plant this year.
With a large chunk of the 2019 crop still waiting to be harvested in some areas, farmers are experiencing many firsts. Red River Farm Network (RRFN) farm broadcast Don Wick, along with Tommy Grisafi of Advance Trading, set out on their own crop tour at the beginning of June. The boots on the ground tour saw planting and harvesting happening simultaneously. Wick says he even talked to a farmer dealing with frost still in the ground.
“He’d been out in the field earlier in the day and was trying to work some ground and got stuck and found frost in the area that he was working in,” says Wick.
Both Wick and Grisafi say fields with harvest-ready corn left over from last year won’t get planted. That’s as the soils haven’t had time to dry down. However, the beginning of June brought warmer temperatures, some wind, and Grisafi says the tone among farmers started to get more positive about planting.
“All of a sudden, the motivation to get out and start planting was there,” says Grisafi. “I talked to clients, they’re still planting wheat. That surprised me. We stopped several of our clients who both farm and sell seed, and they barely had time to talk to us, they were selling so much seed. So, the No. 1 surprise that came out of North Dakota during our tour was the amount of beans they got planted from June 1st to June 10th. Keep an eye on that number. I think it will be a shocker.”
Some analysts think prevent plant on corn could top a million acres in North Dakota this year, but it seems farmers aren’t willing to give up. Wick says it was a promising turn of events for farmers in North Dakota, many exhausted by poor weather conditions two years in a row.
“There’s going to be a significant amount of prevent plant, maybe not to the extreme numbers that we’ve been hearing here in the last few weeks that folks have speculated about, though,” says Wick.
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