U.S. soybean harvest approaching midway point

Oct 11, 2024
By Diego Flammini
Assistant Editor, North American Content, Farms.com

About 47 percent of the harvest is finished, the USDA says

Almost half of the 2024 soybean crop is in the bin.

Farmers have harvested about 47 percent of the country’s 86.1 million soybean acres, or roughly 40.47 million acres, the USDA’s Oct. 8 Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin said.

Soybean farmers in Louisiana are the furthest along.

Producers there have harvested about 77 of the state’s 1.17 million soybean acres, or just over 900,000 acres.

60 percent of the state’s soybean crop is considered in good condition, with another 14 percent rated as excellent.

Growers in North Carolina have harvested the least amount of soybean acres as of the Oct. 8 report.

Producers in the state have harvested about 7 percent of the state’s 1.5 million soybean acres, meaning about 105,000 acres are in the bin.

Around 41 percent of the state’s crop is deemed to be in good condition. Only 5 percent is considered excellent.

Combines continue to bring in the 2024 corn crop.

Nationally, about 30 percent of the U.S. corn acres are harvested.

Remembering farmers planted about 91.5 million acres of corn in 2024, this means about 27.45 million acres of corn are in the bin.

Texas farmers are nearly finished with their corn harvest.

Producers there have harvested 95 percent of the state’s 2.1 million corn acres. This means about 1.99 million acres of corn have gone through Texas combines.

About one third of the state’s corn crop is deemed to be in good condition, with another 8 percent considered in excellent condition.

Producers in Pennsylvania are early in their 2024 corn harvest.

Farmers there have combined 6 percent of their state’s corn, the USDA’s report says.

Pennsylvania farmers planted roughly 1.1 million acres of corn this year, meaning 66,000 acres have been harvested as of Oct. 8.

About 45 percent of what’s been harvested in the state is rated good; 12 percent is rated as excellent.

Winter wheat continues to emerge across U.S. farm fields.

About 25 percent of the national winter wheat crop is up, the USDA reported. This is up from 14 percent last week.

The winter wheat crop in Washington is the furthest along.

About 51 percent of the crop is up, compared to 38 percent last week.

California is reporting no winter wheat emergence as of the USDA’s Oct. 8 report.

Video: Can Gene Editing Give Seeds a Stronger Start?

Reagan Reed has a way of describing his research that might make a plant breeder pause.

“I’m the sort of person who likes to break things to understand them,” he says.

What he breaks are genes involved in seed germination. Reed, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Davis, is investigating whether changing those genes can help seeds establish healthy plants under a wider range of conditions.

Reed recently attended the National Association for Plant Breeding meeting in College Station, Texas, as an NAPB Borlaug Scholar. His work speaks to a question that matters well beyond a research lab: what does it take for a seed to get a crop off to a strong start?

A seed that germinates quickly, alongside the others planted with it, spends less time vulnerable to stresses before seedlings become established.

“If you’re able to bridge that gap between germination to stand establishment, then that’s going to give you the highest probability of having a solid yield that year,” Reed says. “There’s a bunch that can go wrong after that, but it maximises your yield from the start, at least.”

Reed works in Dr. Imtiyaz Khanday’s lab at UC Davis, where his research focuses on seed quality in tomatoes and potatoes. He brings an unusual academic background to the work: at Skidmore College, he studied both biology and Latin.

Reed believes that combination prepared him for research. Translating an ancient text means studying each word, weighing its possible meanings and using context to reach the best interpretation. There is rarely a way to know with complete certainty what an author intended. Science, he says, requires a similar willingness to work through uncertainty.

“Attention to detail and comfortability working with uncertainty,” is how he sums up what Latin taught him.

In the lab, uncertainty can produce a surprise. Reed describes changing one gene and seeing little effect. Changing a second gene also appears to do little. Put both changes in the same genetic background, though, and the result can be substantial.

“I break this gene, nothing really happens. I break this other gene, nothing really happens. I combine them into the same genetic background, and now there’s a massive effect,” he says.

Those interactions matter as researchers gain the ability to edit multiple genes at once. They also complicate any simple account of how a trait works: improving a seed may depend on understanding what several genes do together.

For Reed, the question is whether that knowledge could help seeds germinate reliably when conditions are difficult. Some of the genes he studies prevent germination under certain conditions. That response may serve a plant well in one setting while limiting its usefulness in agriculture. He wants to learn what happens when those genes are changed, and whether the result improves establishment.

Yet a discovery that works in a lab still has a long way to travel before it reaches a field. Reed argues that agricultural biotechnology faces an economic challenge as well as a scientific one. New tools can create value for farmers, he says, but developing them requires a way to support the work in an industry where margins can be thin.

His fellowship with Flagship Pioneering gave him a view across AI, agriculture-related work and human health research. It also reinforced the importance of bringing people with different expertise into the same conversation—a benefit of gatherings such as the NAPB meeting.

“You need to have a team of people with different backgrounds who are willing to work together and approach the same problem in different perspectives and different ways,” he says.

That thinking connects the different parts of Reed’s path. Latin taught him to examine details without expecting a perfect answer. Gene editing lets him test what individual genes do—and what happens when their effects combine. Working with people beyond his own field helps him ask what those findings could become.

He came to agriculture because of its reach: the possibility that work by a small group of researchers could eventually make a difference on a much larger scale. His immediate focus is smaller and more precise. He wants to understand what helps a seed get through its first days and become a healthy plant.