Sunday night’s storms carrying winds up to 70-miles-an-hour damaged corn fields in Crawford and Greene Counties around Denison and Jefferson. Mike Bravard farms nearly three-thousand acres near Jefferson. He did a survey Monday of some of the storm damage. “It’s worse, in Greene County, once you get a few miles south of Highway 30 there’s some corn fields, some broke off, some laid down pretty good. Some’s broke off, some’s just laid over at the roots,” Bravard says. Bravard says despite the storm damage — this year’s corn crop is doing very well.

“The corn looks really good. It could be as good a crop, as good a yield as I’ve ever had,” according to Bravard. But his soybean fields are being hit by sudden death syndrome. “Right there in the beginning of August we got three inches of rain and sudden death set in pretty good, Sudden Death Syndrome. It’s just kind of been expanding ever since,” Bravard says.”Beans are prematurely dying. There’s still going to be beans there where the beans are dying, but they’re just going to be small, I think. And it’s going to take some bushels off of our bean yield.”

Bravard estimates the disease may cut soybean yields by five, maybe even ten-bushels an acre. It’s too soon to assess how much the wind cut west-central Iowa’s corn harvest.

(Radio Iowa)