Walking & Talking Louisiana Fields: September 3, 2024

LA Ag Consultants Association

Ashley Peters

Peters Crop Consulting

Winnsboro, LA

Franklin Parish

Things are looking pretty good overall, we’re done with corn harvest, most of my guys are harvesting rice right now, some of the guys are getting close to the end of rice harvest. Overall, I’d say, we’re in the middle to the other side of rice harvest. Soybean harvest is in full swing, making a lot of progress there. Just starting to defoliate, I guess about ten days into defoliating some cotton.

Corn yields were about average to above average. Not the best crop ever, and not the worst crop ever, a lot of the guys were in the 190 to 210 bushel range, which is a very good yield, but with the price where it’s at, you always need more bushels. I don’t think anybody was tickled with the price and the yield..you might have had a good yield, but the price wasn’t there, or vice versa.

The beans we’ve cut so far have yielded very well overall…what we’ve harvested so far is traditionally our early planted soybeans, planted the last two weeks of March, the first two weeks of April. Now we’re starting with our later planted beans, back end of the planting window, and we always know they’ll yield a little less than the early planted beans, but they’re still holding up pretty well overall. But, we’ve got another round of beans that were planted even later than that, that are probably 3-4 weeks from harvest, at best, and who knows what they’ll do, still got a ways to go on those. In the early planted soybeans, insects were not a huge factor, but as we got into the middle and later planting windows, we sprayed a lot of worms in a lot of bean acres, and some acres have had one to two applications for stink bugs, and even some of those may be looking at a third application somewhere in the next couple weeks. Early beans weren’t a huge deal, but as the planting season progressed, the later planted beans were definitely kind of fun, all those insects in whatever beans were still green, and we’re battling pretty hard in some of those acres.                     

Ryan Viator

Viator Consulting and Research
Houma, LA

Terrebonne Parish

The sugarcane crop looks very promising, we’ve almost completed planting…we’ve been able to plant the cane straight too, and it’s a blessing. Probably the first 2-3 rounds of ripener have gone out, and it looks like it’s working. Looks like we have a tall crop, and looks like it’s going to be a sweet crop, so I’m, overall, very excited about this upcoming harvest. The Mexican Rice Borer (MRB) is becoming more of a problem…it’s spreading more into the heart of the industry. It’s really bothersome in Vermilion, and western Iberia Parishes. We did a lot more spraying for MRB there than in the rest of the state. It’s been very effective.