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: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids