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Wisconsin harvest resumes with drier, colder conditions

Many Wisconsin farmers are back in their combines after last week’s rain delay.

One of them is Zeb Zuehls from the Montello area.  Zuehls tells Brownfield the late season rain helped the corn, but it’s slow to dry down. “It’s just slow and steady. I do a little custom combining, and just waiting for the corn to dry down. You know, everybody’s been spoiled these last few years with corn down in the teens, you know, and here we are in the low and mid 20s, even upper 20s.”

Zuehls says he’s about 65% finished with soybeans and not halfway through the corn yet, and the yields vary based on each field. “It’s all over the board. It’s so variable with our soils here and stuff, I mean, the other day, I was combining corn and I hit a clay vein in a field where I was custom combining for. The monitor went over 200 bushels. I went 150 years farther and got up on a knoll, and we were down to 60.”

Zuehls says considering what the crops went through during the dry summer, the yields are respectable thanks to modern seed genetics. “Just the way the weather played out, I think we were really similar to, rain-wise, as 2012 but the yield was a lot better. I mean, it’s still not what we want, but it’s an improvement over 2012.”

Zuehls says most of his fields are dry and cold enough to keep the ground firm enough for harvesting, and he continued combining corn Wednesday afternoon.