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Farmer focuses on corn harvest with soybeans in the bin

A farmer who raises corn, soybeans, and wheat in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois is focused on harvesting corn for grain now. Mike Berget tells Brownfield, “The overall yield is going to be good, but there’s going to be a real variance in yields, think.”

Mike Berget finished harvesting about 27 hundred acres of soybeans Monday with variable yields based on where the rain fell. “Where they had 65-70 bushels of beans last year, they had 45-50 this year where up our way, the shallow spots hurt but in good dirt, the bean yields weren’t off that much.”

Berget is now focused on the family’s 85 hundred acres of corn scattered across three Wisconsin and three Illinois counties, with some farms dryer than others, and he’s pleased with the first 500 acres on the Darlington, Wisconsin home farm. “And the moisture is, you know, really good, 18 to 25 percent and that’s about as good as you can expect for early October.”

Berget says unlike the drought year of 2003, yields have been a pleasant surprise and he credits modern corn and soybean genetics for his success this year.

He is expecting harvest problems in his drier fields. “We have farms that are 10-12 inches behind normal. That’s where the lodging is going to be a problem.”

Berget says with wet and windy weather expected later this week, they’re using technology tools to help determine which fields get combined first. “As soon as this rain is over with, we’re going to pick out them fields and my daughter is going to be out with a drone, and we can pretty much through FieldView, you can pick them spots out because the biomass is really bad in them areas.”

He says with tools like FieldView, he can see where and when fields dried up, and the earlier it dried up, the more likely the corn stalks will be weaker.

Berget says he hasn’t had a major wind event, but he’s still expecting problems combining corn because of small kernels on spongy cobs.