Walking And Talking Fields August 12, 2024

Louisiana Ag Consultants Association

Hank Jones

RHJ Ag Services

Winnsboro, LA

Franklin Parish

Things are looking pretty good…we’re in the middle of a dry spell right now, which is great for corn harvest, great for wrapping up a cotton crop right now. Soybeans are needing some water, but as long as we’ve got irrigation, we’ll hang in the game a little while.  As mentioned, corn harvest is getting into full swing, most everybody’s going to at least get started this week, and there are those who have been started, primarily south of I-20 for the last 10 days or so. Corn yields, from what I’m hearing, are not spectacular, there’s nothing that is really very disappointing, but certainly nothing is going to be that impressive given the crop prices we’re dealing with right now.

But, hopefully, as history tells us, during the first couple weeks of harvest, we aren’t harvesting our best corn yields, that usually happens somewhere in the middle, so hopefully we’ll be getting into some of our higher yields over the next couple weeks. It’s not going to take that long to get this crop out up here. We’re down overall on our corn acres, so we may be wrapping up corn harvest in the next 10 days to two weeks in a lot of spots.

Cotton crop is wrapping up pretty fast. We had a lot of heat units that drove this crop in June after planting, so when we got into July, we started irrigating a lot of this crop, and then we had that week of cloudy, wet weather toward the end of July; we had a pretty good fruit shed, but after that we’ve been back on top of this crop. The recent little cool down that we’ve had with lower nighttime temps and lower daytime temps has really helped this cotton hang a lot of fruit. Plant bug pressure in Thryvon cotton has been very, very manageable. I’ve been very impressed in what I’m seeing in Thryvon varieties, as far as reduced spraying for plant bugs, especially after that fruit shed event. In the conventional cotton, or I should say, non-Thryvon, we had a persistent level of plant bugs, but nothing that I would say is overwhelming, just a lot more maintenance so that we can maintain and throw on a late crop, a really good top crop for these guys. A lot of guys are watering for the last time, if we’ve got irrigation capabilities, but most of the cotton I’m looking at is from 2-4 NAWF, so we’re kind of on the way out of this cotton crop, primarily on the April-early May planted cotton. There is a good bit of late May planted cotton that we’ll probably keep watering into the first part of September, the way it looks like. Overall, the cotton crop is average to pretty good. I don’t think we’ve got a record out there just yet on the acres that I check, but I think we’ve got the chance to end up with a very solid cotton crop and hopefully we can get prices to move up.

Soybeans, we’re starting to get those desiccated, especially on some of the early April planted beans. I’ve had one area in southwest Franklin Parish that I’ve had to battle red-banded stink bugs in just one location on several farmers, but as you expand out of that area, the RBSB numbers really drop off pretty fast. Having said that, the soybean loopers have really blown up last week. Many, many acres from north of I-20 to south of I-20, especially in some of the beans that are still really green in that R4 to R5 range, we’ve had to go battle soybean loopers pretty hard, so hopefully we’ll see some results of that spraying this week. We need this soybean crop to be as cheap as possible, so I’m hoping we can escape the RBSB moving too much farther north. There are some red-banded’s north of I-20, but primarily it’s browns and greens. Still, I know as we start cutting soybean fields and getting into September, if we still have a lot of green beans still in the field, those beans are going to have a lot of RBSB, so hopefully we can avoid going too late into the season with a lot of these soybeans.

The rice crop; I don’t know of anyone harvesting rice just yet, but a lot of guys are starting to drain their rice fields. If it’s row rice, some guys are still watering some, but I imagine this will be the last week for the bulk of it. A lot of rice is being drained, and I imagine there’ll be some guys cutting rice this week. I’m no great yield predictor of rice, rice can fool me as much as any other crop I look at as far as yields, but we had a time with the rice crop this year early on with all the rains, and so nobody’s going to be surprised with what the rice crop does. We hope we’ve got a good crop…we did the best we could with it.

Scooter LaCoste

LaCoste Crop Consulting

Morganza, LA

Pointe Coupee Parish

Things are looking pretty good…we need another rain right now, but we got plenty earlier in the season. Everybody’s cutting either corn, milo, or soybeans right now, and it’s all doing good. The corn is cutting between 180-200 bushels, and the milo’s around 100-120. The soybeans, the earlier maturing soybeans are cutting, I’d say, from 55-65 bushels.

The sugarcane crop looks pretty good; we’re just starting to plant here, and put out ripener, so everything’s on schedule. We’ve had very light sugarcane borer and Mexican rice borer infestations in the cane. The only place I’ve really had much spraying is in Avoyelles Parish for MRB in sugarcane. In Point Coupee and West Baton Rouge parishes, we’ve sprayed probably less than 5% of the acreage.

In soybeans, the red-banded stink bugs have been pretty bad, and we’ve sprayed them. We probably have two applications out on those. It’s a little too early for soybean loopers and velvetbean caterpillars, but I’m expecting them to start increasing to levels that are treatable in the next couple weeks or so.

We could use some rain to activate some of the pre-emergence herbicides where we’ve planted cane already; you put it out on dry soil and it just doesn’t work, so we could use a rain to activate these soon, and the crops could use a little drink of water too.