Tuesday, October 6, 2009
A lot of progress was made in harvesting soybeans last week in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota that allowed the national soybean harvest to jump ten points to 15 percent complete. However, that is still 13 percentage points behind last year, 21 percentage points behind the five-year average…and there are no assurances that we will see that figure rise very much when next week’s figures are released. When it comes to weather for the first full week of October, this is about as bad as it can get. Northwestern parts of the Corn Belt are likely out of the fields until very late this week (at the earliest) after widespread rains of better than an inch on Monday. It will likely be a lot longer than that for southern and eastern parts of the Corn Belt, considering the inundating rains that will hit that area at the end of this work-week. Topping things off of course will be very cold conditions for the end of this week and into early next week, temperatures that will end the growing season for the vast majority of the Corn Belt. Look for most of the western Corn Belt to be below the freezing mark for lows for Saturday morning, with that cold spreading south and east with time to put the vast majority of the Corn Belt under the freezing mark for lows for at least one day by the time we get to October 12 or 13. We will see drier conditions evolve for the weekend and early next week, but not totally dry…and with all of the cold air around, what precipitation that falls in the Corn Belt during that time will likely be in the form of snow. With all of the above in mind, I think that it would be realistic to look for national soybean harvest progress figures for next week’s report to be right around 20 percent done, which would compare to the five-year average that is right around 60 percent. The national corn harvest will be right around 15 percent, versus a five-year average of around 35-40 percent. Once we can get by this week, there is still real hope for better weather down the road. There are good indications that we will see dramatic warming for October 15 and beyond, and while it may not be totally dry we should see these major rainfall events so common as of late come to an end.
