Early-Stage Outlook: South Dakota Soybean Harvest Appears Positive

Some harvest is happening in South Dakota, but as of the week of September 22^nd, it was just barely underway. There’s a wide diversity of crop and field conditions influencing expected yields, according to Anthony Bly, an extension soils field specialist at South Dakota State University.

“From far too dry to extremely too wet, somewhere in between, there's going to be some really good soybean yields,” Bly told the South Dakota Soybean Network.

In areas where weather, crop maturity and dry-down allow it, at least some soybeans have already been harvested. Year by year, the harvest is happening earlier, said Bly, but this year is an outlier by a couple of weeks.

“Typically, the main harvest period in South Dakota is that first and second week of October,” he explained. “You know, we had a really good warm, humid year. We're slightly ahead on heat units, especially when we talk about other crops, but that just really pushed things along very well. And we're nowhere near being in full harvest mode here. It's just begun.”

As in most years, there are also disease issues negatively affecting soybean yields, but Bly says overall, South Dakota can expect a good harvest.

“Yeah, I would say that we are,” he said, referring to the anticipation of a good harvest, but adding, “It's hard to really say the impact of that wet area in the northeastern part of our state. There's a wide swath that runs from east to west that has a nice north and south pattern that the yields are going to be really good. A farmer I talked to that just started on Monday [September 22,] said that his yields were nearing 65 bushels and that's at least 15 more than last year for this particular farmer.

The report of 65 bushels to the acre is from Minnehaha County in the I-90 corridor east of I-29. At this early point in the harvest, Bly doesn’t venture a solid production guess, except that he’s generally positive.

“Boy, yeah, there's a lot of good beans in a lot of areas. So it's going to be really interesting to see what the overall average for South Dakota is,” he said. “I don't think I have that number because there's so much variability out there.”