different. As winter thaws into spring, farmers are doing last-minute maintenance on their equipment, as well as laying out plans and strategies to ensure a good crop— and profit— come the fall.
CONDITIONS NOW
Planting for this year will start in the first half of April due to crop insurance requirements. Soil temperature also comes into play. Logan McCrea, a field agronomist with the Iowa State Extension Office who covers nine southern Iowa counties, including Marion and Mahaska, said that anything above 50 degrees can generally be considered safe to begin planting, but that weather can be unreliable.
“ Sometimes you can get [ to ] 50 degrees and it’ ll start cooling down a week or two after, and that’ s where you kind of want to be a little careful as far as that is, just because it can be tough on corn, soybeans sometimes, sitting in that cold soil. You can get a bit of emergence problems too,” McCrea said.
Alex Fynaardt, an agronomist with Key Co-Op in New Sharon, is reporting that recent soil moisture samples look good.
“ We’ re actually starting to pull soil samples, and starting to think about some spring work at this point, and what we’ re finding right now is actually the soil conditions are really pretty good,” he said.
“ We didn’ t get a ton of snow,” Fynaardt continued.“ The nice part with that was, when it did get cold, we got some nice frost in the ground, which a lot of people kind of count on to help with their compaction and mellow the soil out for spring. So I think we’ ll see some really good, favorable soil conditions this spring, but we will need to keep some rain showing up in order to keep things going … We just don’ t want to go off into a long-term dry spell, because it would start to get droughty pretty quick.”
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