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Early irrigated corn yields are looking good
Farmers in Nebraska are just starting to harvest some of their early irrigated corn fields.
Ben Benson of Seward, owner of regional seed company Big Cob Hybrids, was in the combine cab with some of his customers this week. He says irrigated yields have been impressive, with a lot of 200 bushel-plus corn.
“The irrigated corn—the corn under the circles and the gravity irrigated corn—some yield levels around Holdrege and Funk are probably anywhere from 230 to 250,” Benson says. “Around Henderson, in that York County area, we were in some really good corn-after-corn, irrigated—105 day corn—that was making about 230 straight through at about 16 moisture.”
Bensen notes that those are fields that had adequate water throughout the season. He says some irrigated fields that ran short of water or were forced to shut off early may only yield in the 170 to 180 bushel range.
Except for those situations—and, of course, the extreme heat—Benson says it was actually a pretty good year for corn under irrigation.
“We didn’t have a lot of the environmental conditions we normally have with hail and greensnap here in Nebraska,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of disease and there weren’t a lot of those other variables this year that really affect our crop.
“So a lot of the irrigated corn is really uniform and looks really good.”
But Benson says non-irrigated—or dryland—corn is a different story, with yields running from 25 to 80 bushels in southeast Nebraska.
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