I haven’t made a report for several weeks as I’ve been on paternity leave and up to my elbows in diapers and bottles for my twin infants. Until this last week my windshield surveys had me thinking that the crop was still doing pretty well despite the hot dry weather over the last two months. I had seen a few patches of stressed plants in pockets of fields with thinner soils, or regions that missed a rain, but overall the crop didn’t seem too visibly stressed. In the last week (prior to the rains that came through on 9/10/26) I started noticing more and larger areas of visible stress. When I walked out in some late planted and double crop beans that from the road, looked healthy; I was surprised at how many pods contain only one or two developing beans. Clearly the hot dry weather was impacting fertilization and seed set more than I realized. A lot of these later planted fields do have a number of very small pods that may still set. Hopefully the rains this week help prevent them from aborting and at least fill the pods we do have out there.

I saw my first combine shelling corn in Marion county on August 27th. I still have only seen that one farm shelling and drying corn, everyone else seems to be letting the triple index heat dry their corn down for now. The hot, dry weather has had all corn in the area at black layer and drying for a while, regardless of how late it was planted. From what I’ve seen, it looks like corn planted from April to mid May had decent fill before being forced into senescence. Ear size may not be anything to write home about, but it seems there’s more grain out there than 2025 in this area (which is a low bar). Fingers crossed as combines start to get rolling.