Brisk Pace of Planting in West Central Indiana

Planting season is off and running in Indiana, and the pace has been very brisk in one particular part of the state.

“I would say for West Central Indiana, if you lumped everything together progress on beans is 80 plus percent and corn is probably pushing 75%,” says Eric Wornhoff, a field sales representative for Channel Seed covering West Central Indiana in the first growing season update. That progress far exceeds the full-state USDA NASS Monday report of about a quarter of the corn and beans being planted.

“There’s a couple pockets along that State Road 39 corridor up and down Hendricks and Boone County that are a little more delayed. There were a little more rain events through there that kind of slowed things down.”

Prospects are now good for planting to continue.

“Through the rest of the week it looks fantastic,” he said. “Temperatures are warming up and you know, warm dirt always dries out faster than cold dirt, so I feel really good about where we’re at. The great news is everything that’s been planted so far, even through all the different rains and even some heavy rains, we have not seen a lot of ponding or crusting and this stuff is germinating very quickly. I saw some fields that have been planted three or four weeks or so ago and even some stuff that was put in on Saturday that’s got a really good sprout.”

Wornhoff says current progress and conditions seem to point to minimal need for replant, if no major rain events move in and upend that outlook.

“Most of everything looks pretty good. There’s always that anomaly out there, a certain time or somebody that’s pushed right up into the rain or tried to finish a part of the field that was a little heavy to begin with. But the only concerns I have now on the second hitch, when you really dive down into history and what we’ve learned in the past 10, 20 years or so, a lot of these bean stubble fields are getting very hairy with a lot of the chick weed. In years past, we’ve seen situations where field cultivators go through or minimum till equipment goes through there and it grinds that stuff up and it puts it down in that two to three inches zone. Well, that’s right where we’re going to be putting seeds here the next four to seven days, and in years past we’ve seen a little more insect pressure on that.”

Eric Wornhoff talks disease, weed and pest pressure too in the full HAT and Channel Seed growing season update: