Southwest Michigan Crops Good but Won’t Break Records

It hasn’t been a perfect year in Michigan corn and soybean fields. But, in a Channel Seeds growing season update, Dan Cable, a Field Sales Representative with Channel Seeds covering the southeast corner of Michigan, says there are some pretty good-looking soybeans to be found.

“Our part of the world actually has not had too much rain like other portions of the state,” he said. “We are today (Tuesday) finally getting some much-needed rain to get these soybeans off to a good August. We’ve had a few aphids in places but not enough to be a real challenge. The biggest challenges, it appears that there’s going to be some weed escapes come through after the challenging spring we had and some of the chemical programs that were used pre didn’t work as well as we had hoped, but generally speaking if we can get some good rain in August, we should have a pretty good bean crop.”

The corn crop looks good too after a later start to planting than normal. And Cable says they have avoided a tar spot outbreak so far.

“A lot of corn didn’t get planted until the middle of May and the second half of May,” he explained. “Generally, we never got a super big rain to hold the corn back too much. It looks good, is coming along pretty well and so far we’ve started spraying for disease, fungus to try and increase our yield potential. But we haven’t seen a lot of tar spot in our part of the world. In fact, I personally have not seen any and I just don’t hear about it. We thought this is the year that we were all set up with the weather we had to maybe get an explosion of it, and it just hasn’t happened. But I still think that a fungicide treatment on our best acres is certainly going to pay and build more bushels.”

He tells MAT farmers should keep looking over those fields because tar spot could still come in. For now, signs are not pointing to record yields, but it should be a good crop in the fall. Hear more in the full MAT and Channel Seeds growing season update: