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Illinois farmer ahead of his southern neighbors

A central Illinois farmer is done with corn planting but some of his neighbors to the south haven’t started yet. Ron Moore tells Brownfield they are ahead of last year at this time, “We started planting corn on April 14th. We had a nice inch of rain last week. We really needed it because some of our ground was really dry and we were worried about making sure we planted our corn into moisture.”

Moore farms in west-central Illinois near Roseville. Southern Illinois farmers have not been so lucky, “Some of them haven’t started planting yet because they’re been getting more rain. We get a tenth of an inch and they get an inch in southern Illinois. So, the track of the storms just went south of us by about 100 miles.”

Moore says he’s keeping his rotation about the same mostly for agronomic reasons.  He has a nearly 50-50 corn and soybean rotation…

“We’ve got soybean cyst nematodes in some of our fields. We’ve got some problematic weeds that are more difficult on some fields that we need to rotate corn and soybeans.”

Moore is the vice president of the American Soybean Association.