The corn harvest is well underway in the Carolinas, and so far so good. Rick Strecker is technical agronomist with Bayer Crop Science. He says fields in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina are coming in strong.

Quite honestly, my corn yields are coming in better than expected. When I think back on how we got a cool, wet start, and then we got into July and part of August real hot and pretty dry in areas, the yields have really been pretty amazing flows. So I’m getting back and even now in South Carolina, but a lot of reports locally I’m getting back are well past 200 And I’d say a lot of moving on up to 225 to 230.

In addition to the versatile new Deltapine varieties, Strecker says farmers’ hard work can be credited with the good yields.

Mike, I think a lot of it is management practices by our growers. They’re really paying attention to the needs, whether it be fertility, insecticides or fungicides. A lot of the growers are really paying more attention to what that crop needs and managing for these higher yields and hopefully, higher return on investment.

Strecker says the fields are workable now, but that’s likely to change by the end of the week.

And for the most part, it is pretty dry up and the area service now down in the Blacklands you know, Pantego, Belhaven, that area. They’ve had a little more rain and some of the fields may be getting a little wet when we get into it. Yeah, with long range forecasts with this storm coming up now, Idalia, I don’t think I don’t anticipate a lot of issues getting back into the fields pretty quick.

Zach Webb is Bayer technical agronomist in southeastern North Carolina. He says soybeans are a tale of two plantings.

The full season stuff has looked really good and this won’t hurt them. It’ll probably help them more than anything. The double crop beans look pretty rough. It’s been so hot and dry. They just haven’t grown. So obviously any water we get out of this thing would definitely help the beans.

With the first tropical storm of the season on the way to Low Country South Carolina and southeastern North Carolina, Webb says growers would love to get the corn crop out of the field, but it’s just too early into harvest.

Don’t get me wrong, they’ve been going as hard as they can and probably can pick some corn a little bit early that’s maybe not quite dry. They’d like to pick it, but they see what’s coming so they get as much as they can to get in front of your ride. They will already pick him pretty hard anyway. So the fact of the storm is coming, there really wasn’t a way to expedite this to get more out of it out other than working longer hours.

The Carolinas should start to see the effects of Idalia as early as this morning.