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Early soybean yields look good as harvest advances in Missouri Bootheel

A farmer in the Missouri Bootheel says the early soybean yields are good as harvest picks up the pace.

“There’s some variability there, a little bit of disease pressure that kind of hurt some of the varieties, but for the most part, I think the beans are going to be really good,” Aaron Porter of Stoddard County tells Brownfield.

Cotton defoliation will be next on the to-do list, and Porter says cotton is looking strong.

“The cotton looks really good,” he says. “It has probably the least amount of disease pressure that I’ve seen in 25 years. Of course, it’s kind of hard to tell right now, but it’d be interested to see what it looks like after the leaves are dropped.”

He says the farm received some rain last week, and it helped settle some of the dust from the dry conditions.

The USDA says soybean harvest is underway across the Delta. In Missouri, harvest is just getting started. In Arkansas, harvest is 35 percent complete. Kentucky soybean harvest is 17 percent complete and harvest is 26 percent complete in Tennessee.

The USDA says cotton bolls are still opening in the Delta, with no harvest progress being reported yet.