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Irrigation season in full swing in Nebraska

Irrigation season is in full swing in Nebraska.

Terry Horky, who farms near Sargent in central Nebraska, says hot and dry conditions in June forced them to start irrigating corn and soybeans earlier than normal.

“The pivots have been running—most of them have made three or four rounds, on the sandier soils,” Horkey says. “There have been some years we haven’t had to irrigate our beans yet, but we’ve had to irrigate them some this year to keep them moist on top, so they didn’t dry out.”

Horky has both irrigated and non-irrigated crops.

“The irrigated crops are still looking all right up here,” he says. “Some of the dryland is really needing some water—it’s showing a lot of moisture stress on the non-irrigated.”

Horky says the other big challenge has been weed escapes in soybeans, including kochia, marestail and Palmer Amaranth. He says they’ll probably have to walk some fields to remove those weeds.

“The herbicides didn’t work like we thought they would. We certainly don’t want those weeds to go ahead and seed out.  We’ll probably have to pull them to make sure they don’t.”

Horky says their soybeans are in the flowering stage, but the irrigated corn has not started tasseling yet.