From the Fields: LeeAnne Bulman with Kaleb Ellis

Starting at dark and ending at dark,” is how Kaleb Ellis describes the ongoing 2025 harvest.

He said there are quite a few soybeans left to go in our area of western Wisconsin.

“It’s only going to get harder and harder,” he said. “There are not perfect conditions anymore. The days are shorter, and it stays more damp and harder to get them dried out, so that they will feed through the combine and thresh nice.”

They started corn harvest on their ridge land, where they had sprayed with fungicide.

“That Southern Rust cooked some of the older hybrids,” he said.

Field averages were 170 bushels to the acre instead of 200-plus. He thinks the corn forecast for a bumper harvest is not there. Anthracnose, another fungal disease, is also a problem he spotted in some of his fields.

Moving to his grandparents’ farm, he saw much-better yields with a newer hybrid of corn; yields were better, to as much as 190 bushels per acre. The corn is running dry, with moisture between 16 percent and 18 percent out of the field. It dried out early because of the fungal diseases. The exception was very-long-day corns – more than 100 days – which was planted for silage. With new bin dryers, the Ellis team is drying the corn before taking it to town.

“We have about 400 acres left to do, so we’ll be in the seat for a while,” Ellis said. “It’s going to be a long dragged-out harvest; I’m thinking because of how wet it’s been. It seems like it rains enough to keep us out of the field for a few days or a few hours, and then we go a couple more days.”

There has also been a holdup because of maintenance work with one of the local corn buyers. Ellis considered taking the corn directly to the markets at the Mississippi River, but prices weren’t good enough to justify the extra fuel. He’s wondering if corn will be in short supply when harvest is finished and while farmers wait for a better price to sell.