AM Minnesota Today Tom Hoverstad

My guest on today's AM Minnesota program will be Tom Hoverstad who is a scientist at the Southern Research and Outreach Center at Waseca. The topic will be the 2019 growing season with all the challenges. The 2019 growing season will be remembered for a long time. It was tough right from the beginning with all the rain and cloudy weather. We saw a lot of the corn and soybeans planted much later than normal. In addition some farmers did not get all their corn planted and had to file a Prevented Plant claim.

Growing degree units were much behind normal the whole season. Farmers were very concerned about corn and soybeans reaching maturity, even the acres that were planted early. It was the last two weeks of September that really saved the crop. We had a lot of sunshine and temperatures much above normal. However, it helped the late planted corn but was not enough! A farmer sent me a message last Friday that he had moved into some late May planted corn. It was 33 percent moisture and 50 pound test weight!