U.S. soybeans start to emerge

May 13, 2022

About 3 percent of the crop is up, the USDA says

By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com

Soybean plants across the United States are emerging from the ground.

About 3 percent of the crop is up, the USDA said in its May 10 Weekly Weather and Crop Bulletin. This is six percentage points down from this time last year.

March’s Prospective Plantings report estimated U.S. farmers are planting about 91 million acres of soybeans in 2022.

This means soybeans have emerged on about 2.73 million acres.

On a state level, soybeans in Louisiana are the furthest along.

About 55 percent of the state’s soybean crop has emerged, the USDA’s report says. This is up from 36 percent last week.

Mississippi soybeans are 40 percent emerged, compared to 21 percent last week.

Arkansas and North Carolina report 20 and 15 percent soybean emergence, respectively.

The U.S. corn crop continues to emerge too.

About 5 percent of national corn acres have emerged, the USDA’s report says.

This figure represents an increase of 2 percent from last week.

Projections for 2022 U.S. corn acres is about 89.5 million acres, meaning corn on about 4.48 million acres have emerged.

Corn in North Carolina is the furthest along with 76 percent of corn in that state emerged.

Texas, reporting 63 percent of its corn emerged, and Tennessee with 25 percent of that state’s corn emerged, round out the top three states.

Spring wheat plants are also continuing to emerge.

About 9 percent of the projected 11.2 million acres (1.008 million acres) has emerged. This is up from 5 percent the week before.

Six states accounted for 100 percent of U.S wheat acres in 2021.

Here’s where those states stand now in terms of 2022 crop emergence:

Washington – 49 percent
Idaho – 39 percent
South Dakota – 28 percent
Montana – 16 percent
Minnesota and North Dakota – 0 percent

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