DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – A record 85.1 million acres of soybeans are in the ground, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Tuesday, but it’s not clear whether they’ll all sprout because persistent rain in some Midwestern states has flooded fields and slowed plant development.
The planted soybean acreage is 2 percent more than in 2014, with the largest increases found in Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and Tennessee. However, just 89 percent of soybean seeds nationally have emerged from the ground – about 5 percentage points behind the five-year average.
Corn and soybean conditions in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and Ohio have shown deterioration in recent weeks with the heavy rain. And in the soaked states, farmers who won’t get their soybeans fields planted by Wednesday may be forced to use crop insurance to cover the lost production.
Missouri and Illinois have experienced the wettest Junes since the National Weather Service began keeping such records in the late 1800s. More than a third of Missouri’s intended soybean crop has gone unplanted, and Kansas has 14 percent that’s unplanted.
“Any chance I could get between rains, I went ahead and got things planted,” said Jim Boerding, 46, who farms more than 1,600 acres near St. Charles, Missouri, west of St. Louis and near the rain-swollen Mississippi and Missouri rivers.