Weather Extremes Test South Dakota Farmer’s Soybean Yield

As the 2024 harvest was ending, Ross Tschetter reflected on getting his crop out. He’s generally pleased.

“It’s been good, it’s been good,” said Tschetter, from his home between Bridgewater and Salem, South Dakota. “Our soy crop was average to maybe below average; we just kind of ran out of moisture here at the end of the summer. And the corn crop looks pretty good actually. We’re pretty pleased with that.”

What was remarkable about the growing season in its entirety, said Tschetter, is how the weather changed from one extreme to another, which might have been the reason soybean yields were a bit below average.

“We started off kind of cold and wet in the early part of the spring and then had pretty favorable planting conditions right away and received some very big rains in May and June that caused drown-outs and flooding and so on and so forth,” said Tschetter, a director on the board of the South Dakota Soybean Association. “And then where I’m at, we really haven’t had a meaningful rain since the middle of August, around Dakotafest time, and so you do get a bit of the challenges of both of those things.”

The adage of August rain making the soybean crop was true to a point. In Tschetter’s case, the late summer precipitation saved his crop.

“The August rain that we had kept us from really sliding off into very low yields with soybeans, whereas if our average is in the forties around here, I’m glad to have that because it just really did not rain when [the plants] were trying to fill the pods at the end,” he said. “And so planting narrow-row soybeans on 15-inch rows here like I do, we try to keep the weed pressure down and maximize whatever rain we can get throughout the summer, so I can’t call that a complete loss.”

It was after conversations with his agronomist that Tschetter determined narrow-row soybeans are the best fit for his farm.