Walking and Talking Fields September 9, 2024

Louisiana Agricultural Consultants Association

Jeremy Babin

Calvin Viator, Ph.D. & Associates, LLC

Thibodaux, LA

Lafourche Parish

We’ve had 5-7 inches rainfall in some areas the past five days, so we’re looking for a dry spell, but I don’t think we’re going to get it since they’re giving more tropical moisture this week through Thursday or Friday, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to get it any time soon. Most of our cane beans that were planted early April or even March have been harvested already, and those had good quality and good yields. Now we’re just trying to finish up on some of the later beans.

The tropical situation is not something we wanted to see at the moment. We still have a few hundred acres of cane land beans that still need to be cut; they’ve been desiccated. We also have about 1500 acres or so of non-cane land beans that are still green, but turning, so it won’t be long before we desiccate those. It can’t come soon enough because the red-banded stink bug situation down here is relentless. Red-bands are usually pretty bad down here, but this year since mid-July we’ve had a lot of the beans on a two week schedule, applying insecticide every two weeks to try to control them.

Cane-wise, a lot of our farmers have finished planting cane…we were blessed with a somewhat dry August that allowed them to finish planting. We do have some that still have a ways to go. Some are getting behind on ripener due to the wet weather, the flying service just can’t get out there with all this wet weather we’ve had. The first couple sugarcane mills are supposed to open around September 18th, and the last one October 1st, so grinding is right around the corner. I hope this projected storm doesn’t do too much damage.

Travis Vallee

Cenla Ag Services
Pineville, LA

Rapides Parish 

We’re kind of all over the place with soybeans…we’ve got some we cut August 1st, and I’ve got some still at R5 that we’re fighting stink bugs in. Actually, I’ve got a lot of late beans…I’m finding stink bugs this morning, as far as soybeans go. I had thought they might be a little lighter this year after the freeze we had, but they’re pretty tough here lately. I just wasn’t expecting there would be this many this year…we’ve treated three times for red-bands on most soybeans this year.

We’ve got the best looking cotton crop in probably the last ten years. We usually do make a good cotton crop around here, but the hard part is getting it to the gin. There’s usually something that’ll happen before we pick it and we’ll lose it to the weather. Last year, we lost it up front to the drought, everybody was picking fine, but this year, we’ve had 12 inches of rain on it the last couple weeks, and now we’re fixing to get more, plus a lot of wind, looks like, so it’s disheartening, and it’s going to happen again. This tropical system is not good news! Our cotton looked like a bumper crop, but it's lodged due to high winds we had already; I think they clocked 90 mph winds at the airbase in Alexandria from one of those storms we had a couple weeks ago. The cotton just kind of laid over. The cotton was looking excellent, but it’s not looking too optimistic right now, unfortunately. I don’t think it can recover. We got a little bit defoliated, and the rest of it is mature enough to defoliate, so I guess when this system gets out of here, we’ll be wide open on it. Usually we’re picking cotton by the 10th of September, but this year we’re a little bit later. We had a wet spring and that delayed planting, plus we had a two week wet spell in July that kind of delayed the cotton further, but also made it a better crop. Overall, insect pressure was light, we sprayed a couple times for plant bugs in Rapides Parish. In the cotton up in Natchitoches, they were pretty non-existent. I sprayed early season for some flea hoppers more than anything, and there were a few tarnished plant bugs, but other than that, we haven’t sprayed insecticide on the cotton up there. That’s very unusual.

I had some milo, but the crop wasn’t that great. Most of it was probably 90 bu/A. Some of it went 110 bu/A, but the majority was in the 90 bushel range. I figured that was mainly due to the wet spring.  Whenever it did rain, it was a 4-5 or 6 inch rain, and we just had waterlogged conditions. The corn was good overall, but we also had some waterlogged issues in it. The crop wasn’t as good as last year, but we had some fields, depending upon the drainage and what not, and where we put extra nitrogen on, made a good crop. It just wasn’t as good a crop as you would have thought. It was just too wet at times…and prices could always be better.