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As I type this we are ending the first week of November. And as one drives the countryside there are still fields of double crop soybeans that remain unharvested. Many acres were not ripe before the frost and as such the frost helped to ripen them. But weather since then has not been favorable to help cure the beans and most certainly has not been fit to harvest on many days either.

While the leaves have mostly fallen off the plants and the pods have now gone from greenish brown to a yellow brown, the beans inside are still “butter beans”. I have looked at some fields in which the bean size is very small. To me this is an indication of the growth stage at which the frost occurred. I would assume that we were about R6 in most cases. This could translate into yields from high teens to low twenties in a lot of fields.

Also a new issue has come up. A lot of volunteer wheat is now showing up in these fields. The wheat is growing pretty good in some fields and that will present a harvest challenge as well. Now we have green grass to take in to the machine as well as straw and the bean plants themselves. Combines will have to be adjusted much more carefully to insure a clean sample. It will be important to keep grain monitored if placed in a grain bin.

Last but not least are the shorter days. We now have less time for optimum harvest weather during the day to get these beans cut. With the heavy dew and foggy mornings we have had, in some cases we have had only an hour or two of “good” bean cutting weather on the days day when we could cut. And, looking at the weather forecast, there looks to be more days of not cutting than cutting for the next week or so.

What a season. First it was hard to get the double crop beans planted. And now it is hard to get them harvested.

Kelly is serving as the Illinois Soybean Association Double-Crop Specialist. He was raised on the family farm in Benton, Illinois and graduated from Southern Illinois University (SIU)-Carbondale with a BS in Agriculture Education and Mechanization, and a Master’s of Science (MS) in Plant and Soil Science.  Kelly has spent 25 years as a soil fertility agronomist and precision agriculture consultant in southern Illinois while also spending 4 years as a Farm/Agronomy Manager and GIS Coordinator for a large farm in southeastern Illinois. He is a Certified Professional Agronomist and a Certified Crop Advisor.