Farmers took advantage of dry conditions to keep planters rolling in many parts of the state recently despite rollercoaster temperatures.
With 5.1 days ranked suitable for fieldwork the last week of April, planting progress reached 40% complete for corn and 39% for soybeans statewide, 11 and 24 points ahead of the average pace as of May 1, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service Illinois field office.
And the countryside continued to buzz with fieldwork activity the first week of May despite blustery conditions the first few days of the month.
“With the weather outlook (favoring mostly dry conditions), I don’t really see any major problems getting the Illinois corn and soybean crops planted this year in a timely fashion,” Scott Irwin, the Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing at the University of Illinois, told FarmWeek.
Some farmers were more aggressive with their planting strategy in recent weeks whereas others opted to wait for warmer temperatures. Now, it looks like much of the crop could get off to a good start after some unseasonably cool stretches.
Farmers planted 24% of soybeans and 22% of the corn crop from April 23-30 in Illinois.
“The bottom line is there’s always a pretty wide window for planting in near optimal conditions and we’re a long way from being out of that,” said Irwin, who noted corn yields typically incur little yield penalty when planted up to mid-May.
One thing farmers can’t really do, at least on a statewide basis, is speed up planting progress on a daily basis, based on U of I research.
The expected peak rate of corn planting per suitable day in Illinois continues to hover around 800,000 acres, which has not changed much in the last 40 years.
“What we’ve studied is the rate of planting progress at the state and national level, not on any individual farms,” Irwin said. “And our research shows, very counterintuitively for most people, that at that level (state and nationwide), we don’t plant any faster than we did say 50 years ago.”
How can that be in today’s age of 24-plus row planters that can go 7-9 mph?
It’s just simple math when applied to the industry nationwide, which has seen the number of farms decline from 6.8 million in 1935 to around 2 million in 2022, meaning there’s much fewer people to do the work on much larger operations.
“That’s the key insight (to the planting rate studies),” Irwin said. “It’s easy to lose sight of how many more farmers and planters there were back in the 1960s.
“To illustrate this idea, if you lined up all the planters in the Corn Belt from east to west in 1960, it would be thousands and thousands of little planters,” he noted. “If you did this same exercise today (with fewer machines, but much larger planters), the land covered end to end would be roughly the same.”
But, while the number of acres planted continues to go up each week this season, crop prices recently broke in the opposite direction.
“I think the markets are telling us flashes of recessionary worries with some of the price movements,” Irwin said. “I think it will be hard for prices to have any substantial upward movement from here without some kind of major weather problem, particularly if we have good growing conditions.”
Fortunately, the majority of crop acres are covered by some form of revenue insurance.
“One thing to take a look at is coverage for the uninsured component of your production,” Irwin added. “Even at today’s bids, there’s some decent forward pricing opportunities. I’d maybe be more aggressive with that part of marketing than many have been in recent years.”
In other crop news last week, 15% of winter wheat headed as of May 1, which was 4 points ahead of the average pace in Illinois.