After bleak numbers last year and despite dry late-summer weather, local and statewide production levels for soybeans are on the rise. The United States Department of Agriculture forecast a 17 percent increase in soybean harvest levels for the state earlier this month and local farmers reported similar and even larger increases, partly because of late rainfall totals.
The USDA forecast that Delaware farmers will harvest 5.5 million bushels of soybeans this fall, up from about 4.7 million last year. The average yield — in bushels per acre, according to the USDA — is also up from 26 to 31. Clifton Murray, of Murray Brothers Farms in Selbyville, said his farm saw a 50 percent increase in soybean production from last year.
“Last year, we got slammed. Last year was a terrible year for soybeans for us,” Murray said. “We’re pretty well satisfied (this year).”
Murray said he planted full-season soybeans on 500 acres and used the beans as a double-crop on 1,000 acres. Double-cropping means planting a crop where one has already grown in the same season. This year, Murray grew wheat on those roughly 1,000 acres before harvesting in late June and early July and then planting the beans.
Soybean yields were in the 40s on the full-season crop, and will likely be in the mid- to upper-30s for the double-crop, he said — a number that could have been way down without welcomed September rain after a dry August.
Only 2.4 inches of precipitation was measured in Georgetown for the month of August, nearly 2 inches less than the monthly average, according to the National Weather Service. September brought 7.1 inches of rain to the area, according to the weather service, roughly 3 inches more than the monthly average.
“The late rains were beneficial to the double-crop,” Murray said. “It would have been much worse (without that rain).”
Other area farmers did not have the double-crop — or the benefit of that late rain — but some still saw moderate increases from last year. Russell Banks, who farmed soybeans on 200 local acres this year, reported a yield of 30 bushels per acre, a number he still called less than average.
“It was so dag’on dry,” Banks said. “In August we didn’t get any rain at all. That’s what killed my yields.”
Eric Albright, who runs the C.P. Townsend Farm and farmed soybeans on about 300 acres this season, said he saw a 14 percent increase in production, reporting yields of about 33 per acre after hovering in the low-20s at this time last year.
Albright noted that, while the increase was much-welcomed, production levels are still significantly less than they were before 2005.
“I think this year if we had an inch of rain at the right time, we would have been up considerably,” Albright said. “It was pretty bad last year.”
While July’s rainfall amounts were normal after an abnormally wet June, late dry weather has been blamed for unfavorable harvest levels this time of year.
The 4.7 million bushels harvested statewide last year was 4 million bushels less than the 2004 statewide harvest of 8.7 million bushels from an average 42 bushel yield, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the statistical arm of the USDA.
Local farmers, again, blamed abnormally dry weather. According to NASS numbers, Delaware farmers harvested 6.4 million bushels in 2003, a year after they only harvested 4.6 million, in 2002 — a number even worse than 2005.