By Blake Haas

BLOOMINGTON – As fields begin to dry out, farmers across central Illinois are starting up their combines for the fall harvest season.

After a shakey growing season with record prices, untimely rain, and inflation, farmers are just beginning to harvest in McLean, DeWitt, Logan, and Tazewell counties.

“It’s just getting started. (Crops) are advanced where you would expect it to be advanced,” Hall of Fame Agriculture Broadcaster Max Armstrong said on the afternoon show. “For example, in North Carolina, they are about half to three-fourths done, of course, with shorter maturing crops and getting started. In Illinois, we are just easing into the fields for the first time.

Of course, right across the central Illinois belt, you’ll see a lot of work done very quickly. A lot of growers have been getting into the fields in Logan county, for example, Saganamon county, and gradually, little by little, McLean County too.”

While the jury is still out on the field yield, Armstrong said from the looks of it, this year would be good despite the circumstances.

“I think so. It depends on who you talk to, of course. For west central Illinois and a lot of central Illinois not bad. You get over in that Champaign area, especially southern Champaign county, and they were just too dry. It will show up in the yields, I would imagine. You never know, so of those folks may get some pleasant surprises,” Armstrong added.

In the latest crop report, average statewide topsoil moisture is rated as 10 percent very short, 14 percent short, 61 percent adequate, and 15 percent surplus.

Blake Haas can be reached at [email protected].