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Southern Wisconsin farmer says harvest conditions good with 1,000 acres to go
A southern Wisconsin crop farmer says about two-thirds of his harvest work is done. Casey Kelleher tells Brownfield, “Another ten days, I’ll be done and have everything wrapped up.”
Kelleher says he has about 35-hundred acres of crops to harvest, and still has nearly a thousand acres of corn to combine before he is done. Unlike central and northern parts of Wisconsin where rain and some snow have slowed harvest progress, he tells Brownfield conditions have been great near him.
Kelleher says he was also able to adjust his management plan this season and save some money. “We treated our corn-on-corn a little different than the (corn-on) beans. Normally, we treat everything with fungicide, but as healthy as the corn-on-beans looked this year, we didn’t push out a fungicide on them but I think it definitely helped the corn-on-corn ground.”
Kelleher is also pleased to see corn prices move in the right direction. “When you look at what it’s done in the last month or two. It’s made some red ink turn black.”
He says last year also had good yields, but much of the profit was eaten up by the drying bill.
And looking ahead to 2021, Kelleher is not sure what his final crop plans will be. “The way that the bean market has come back a little bit and the way some are talking about South America, there might be a few more bean acres than what’s normally expected but corn is holding it’s own so I don’t know. I think it’s going to be a farm-by-farm decision.”
Kelleher is a past president of the Wisconsin Corn Growers Association, and farms near Whitewater, Wisconsin about half an hour southwest of Milwaukee.