Farmers in northeast Iowa are destroying several thousand acres of corn and soybeans in fields flooded by torrential September rains. Most of the corn and soybeans in those fields will be destroyed this fall to prevent the seeds from sprouting next spring.
Brian Lang, a Decorah-based Iowa State University Extension Agronomist, estimates ten-thousand crop acres were under water a month ago.
“And of this ten-thousand acres there’s probably a few thousand of that that are still going to be harvested for on-farm feed,” he says. “Going through some proper testing to make sure it’s still of good quality. But the rest of that is simply going to be destroyed. Some of that has already been destroyed. Some of that it’s still too wet to get into those fields to destroy.”
Lang says outside the flood-affected fields in the seven northeast Iowa counties he monitors, corn and soybean harvest is on pace with previous years.
The USDA’S Monday crop updates says one-third of Iowa’s corn crop, and nearly two-thirds of the soybeans are harvested.