My dad and I were walking our fields yesterday thinking how much we needed some rain. We noticed the hardness of the soil and the lesions it caused from a lack of moisture. As we looked at our soybean fields, we noticed that with some more rain, more pods would develop and fill out.

We must have said the word ‘rain’ a special number of times to make the Gods listen because last night, it rained! We received an inch of glorious rain and I must be turning into a farmer because I was laying in bed listening to the thunderstorm smiling from ear to ear. I’ve never been that excited about rain before.

On our crop scouting tour of our fields we noticed how beautiful the soybeans were. The plants are tall but they could still use some additional pods per stalk. We noticed about 3-4 pods per node was average and about 45 pods per stalk was average. We would like to see that number doubled.

Insects and fungal issues were little to none and right now our soybean fields look gorgeous. We really hope that they get very little stress in the next month and more moisture to gain more pods.

The issues with corn that I’ve been reading about are Goss’ Wilt, a bacterial disease, and corn aphids. Yes, corn aphids. Yet another pest to scout for and determine whether they affect yield or not. We didn’t see any Goss’ Wilt, but we did notice Grey Leaf Spot in many of our fields, some more than others.

Also, we discovered some firing of the stalks and bottom leaves as we walked deeper into some of our fields. In some fields the outside rows were very green from root to tassel but as we walked inward, the firing was more prevalent, even in some moisture filled soils. We could have a nitrogen deficiency issue or a compaction issue in those areas.

We followed the yield test calculations that the ProFarmer scout team tour is using and came up with 172.5 bushels/acre. We really hope we will see better yields than this this year. Our corn ears looked healthy but they definitely were reduced in size by the heat wave that took place during pollination in July. The kernels are already starting to dent and the kernel size is not as large as we would like to see.

All in all, we were satisfied with what we saw. There is always room for improvement but in general our plants look healthy and on track for some good yields in our part of Iowa!