News

Harvest better than expected for Wisconsin farmer

A southern Wisconsin farmer says yields are good and harvesting is going smoothly.

Steve Duwe raises corn and soybeans near Johnson Creek, between Madison and Milwaukee. He tells Brownfield soybeans topped the 70 bushel per acre mark. “Soybeans? It was the highest yield I’ve ever had for soybeans by almost ten bushels, and corn, we just finished a farm yesterday where we averaged 240.4 bushels.”

Duwe says the good yields and the talk about China getting back into the soybean market has been a welcome dose of good news. “Soybean prices have picked up almost a dollar a bushel. The down side is the basis, but we’re still ahead of where we were a month ago.”

 Duwe says like many farmers, he sold a lot of soybeans before the recent price improvements. “I think a lot of people did that because things were on the decline and nobody trusted that, you know, it’s a bad price but it could easily could get worse. so a lot of farmers dumped their beans instead of putting them into storage just to be on the safe side. Well now, there’s a little regret with that, but we didn’t know at the time.”

Duwe says in his area, some of the larger growers and some of the smaller growers are done harvesting, but there’s a fair amount of corn still standing in the fields.