Planting Progress Hit and Miss Around Indiana

USDA says planting progress jumped from 10% to 26% for Indiana corn and from 10% to 25% for Indiana soybeans week over week. There are still parts of the state where it’s more difficult to turn a wheel in the field than others.

As part of Hoosier Ag Today’s Crop Tour Tuesday radio segment, East Central Indiana farmer Jenna Scott from Gaston says it’s been very slow that way.

“Here in Delaware County, not much has been planted. We’ve been too wet to get into the fields to do even any field work, let alone planting. Hopefully by the end of this week we’ll be able to do something. Our weather forecast looks a lot better after Wednesday. I spoke with a farmer in Galveston, Indiana who was finished planting his crops. So, they missed a lot of the rains we got.”

In West Central Indiana, farmer Ryan Rippy says they got pretty wet last week. They’re just working on getting organized and ready for the next dry stretch.

“We’ve been working on getting fertilizers filled back up and seed, those sorts of things. We’re currently working on getting our planter cleaned out to switch over to our non-GMO waxy acres, and just trying to get things ready for later in the week when it gets dried out.”

Dubois County farmer J.R. Roesner wishes they were a bit further along in the southern part of the state.

“This past week, we had a couple of days where we were able to get some corn and soybeans planted. The rain set in again late last week, and continued over the weekend. We’ve received a fair amount of rain, and it looks like it’ll definitely keep us out for the better part of this week. After that, the weather looks like it will clear up, and I think we’ll be able to make some progress towards the end of the week here. It’s definitely getting late in our area. I have some concern over the dates. Hopefully we’ll be able to get planting completed here soon.”

And it was just last week that LaPorte County farmer Denise Scarborough said that things were looking great in the northwest corner of Indiana where they’ve been missing rains. She says they did finally receive some this past week.

“We finally received some rain last week, midweek, but we were back in the fields Friday and Saturday continuing to plant corn. We had some more rain on Sunday, which is probably going to put us out of the field for a couple days. But we’re actually moving pretty well along. We grow quite a bit of specialty crops up here in Northwest Indiana. I know Red Gold tomatoes are going to be started planting this week, and we should be starting to plant seed corn within the next week or so.”

Click the play button below to hear our Hoosier Ag Today Crop Tour Tuesday segment with Scott, Rippy, Roesner, and Scarborough.