News

Southern Illinois farmer switching acres; thankful for dry stretch

A southern Illinois farmer says 2025 will go down as the most challenging of his farming career.

“You know, I don’t have much corn planted. This is probably the least amount of corn I’ve ever planted.”

Granvil Travis, who has only half of his Massac County farm planted, says this week’s break in the weather should allow him to switch hundreds of acres from corn to soybeans.

“A lot of our nitrogen early we put down with our corn planter.”  He says, “So, a lot of that nitrogen won’t get wasted cause we never got it planted.  We’ll just go in there and we’ll just plant beans on it instead, and then hopefully next year we can put it in corn.”

He tells Brownfield his goal is to get as much planted as possible as the ground dries, but his river bottom ground is still submerged in places.  

“The biggest thing that I’m worried about now is getting a dry September or late August, whenever these later beans start finishing, because then that’s gonna hurt our yield on those later planted beans.”  He says, “If they don’t fill out, you know, you can get backward on a crop pretty quick.”

Travis says his crops that were planted timely are doing well, so he’s optimistic their strong potential can make up for any yield impacts to his later planted crops.

AUDIO: Granvil Travis – Illinois farmer