News

SD grower making harvest headway

A southeastern South Dakota grower who saw much of his corn flattened by a late August storm says they’re making headway getting it up.

“We’ve probably still got 30 bushel or more laying on the ground there but at least we could get a majority of it and we feel good about that.”

Dave Poppens tells Brownfield his bean harvest has been hampered somewhat., “We just finished up beans, what we could get Tuesday, so it was kind of a drier summer and now since that storm we’ve had probably six inches of rain. So now we’re actually running into problems in the bean fields. We’re running into wet spots, the mud is starting to be a problem for us.”

Overall, he says harvest is ahead of schedule and yields look pretty good.

Poppens expects to be done before Halloween, “That’s always good to get that done before, hopefully before that first snow flies and get all the crop out of the field and safely put away somewhere. And this year we’re thankful for the yields which seem to be above average and the prices are higher than they’ve been in the past. We’re thankful for all that.”

Poppens told Brownfield on Wednesday they’ve had all kinds of weather this season – from drought to tornadoes to rain, “We are approximately 50 degrees. We had rainy overnight, probably a half inch, seven-tenths of an inch here. The western part of the state in the Black Hills, there’s parts over there where they had a foot of snow overnight. Yes, big differences across the state.” Poppens farms at Lennox, South Dakota.