(Radio Iowa) – Anyone who’s driven through Iowa’s farmland lately likely noticed the corn and soybean crops are beginning to sprout. Angie Rieck-Hinz, a field agronomist with the Iowa State University Extension in north-central Iowa, says so far, the crops are coming in strong. “We have a lot of corn that’s already at that V4 stage and I think the most advanced beans I’ve seen are V2 or V3,” Rieck-Hinz says. “So for those folks that planted earlier, we got some really nice looking crops out there. For folks who’ve planted in the last week or 10 days, we’ve got stuff just coming out of the ground.”

Recent rains flooded some central Iowa fields, and Rieck-Hinz says that’s not be the only weather challenge of late. “There has been some replanting in some of those areas that were hit by that Memorial Day storm because between the wind and the dust blowing, we just kind of lost some of those soybeans out there,” Rieck-Hinz says. “So there are some people that are replanting those fields or trying to go back in and thicken up those stands.”

The new U-S-D-A report shows 98-percent of Iowa’s corn crop is planted, three days ahead of the five-year average, while 94-percent of soybeans are in the ground, which is six days ahead of the average.