FAIRFIELD – Farmers were very anxious at the close of the 2023 harvest because of the long drought that Iowa had suffered that year.

However, Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Farm Management Specialist Charles Brown said the state’s corn yields surprised everyone by being up 5 bushels over last year with 201 bushels per acre.

“That was pretty amazing,” Brown said. “The crops went in early that year, and [yields] are more about when you get the rain than how much, and the corn got the rain at the right time. Southeast Iowa probably got hurt worse than the rest of the state. There were spots that didn’t get any rain, but the corn yield was still up.”

Bean yields were about 58 bushels per acre, down 0.9 from a year ago.

Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Field Agronomist Virgil Schmitt said a number of factors explain 2023’s high corn yield despite the drought. One of those was the large amount of soil moisture at the beginning of 2023, which helped the crops survive the summer drought. He said the downside is that, because of the lack of rain, there isn’t much soil moisture left for the 2024 growing season.

“We’re not going to have that buffer in 2024 that we did in 2023,” he said.

Another factor at play was the lack of intense heat during the drought.

“Even a few degrees of temperature difference makes a big difference in the amount of water a plant needs to use,” Schmitt said.

Schmitt said that one unusual benefit last year was the smoke from the Canadian wildfires because that lowered the temperature a little bit because it partially blocked the sun. He said it might seem counter-intuitive because the smoke would also block the solar radiation the plant uses for photosynthesis, but overall it seems to be good.

“Some [studies] show that diffuse light is used more efficiently than direct sunlight,” Schmitt said.

Precipitation over the winter is not always so helpful to crops because it can’t penetrate the frozen ground, but Schmitt said Iowa’s early winter was so warm this year that the ground didn’t freeze.

“The snow we got a week ago, as it melts off, there’s a real good chance that it will soak in, and that’s going to be good,” Schmitt said. “It takes about 10 inches of snow to make 1 inch of rain, so there’s not that much to go down even though we see a lot of white out there.”

Schmitt said farmers should be able to look forward to a relative dry planting season without many delays. He said the main concern he has for 2024 is getting enough rain in May and June to make up for the lack of rain last year.

“If May and June turn out to be fairly normal, we should be OK,” he said. “On my own farm [near Muscatine], I got no rain last year from May 8 to June 18, and those are the two wettest months of the year. If we have a repeat of that in 2024, without the soil moisture we had going into 2023, it’s going to hurt a lot. It makes me a little nervous.”

On the economic side, Brown said farm profits were down in 2023 compared to the prior year because of the falling price of corn, which is now about $4.80 per bushel compared to just a year or two earlier when it was $6.54 per bushel. Brown said the drop in price is the result of a drop in demand, which depends a lot on exports.

“China has backed off importing so much corn from the U.S.,” he said. “On the positive side, fertilizer prices have come down. Feed and chemical prices are up a bit. We’re probably not going back to $2-$3 [per bushel], but we’re probably going to return to low profit margins compared to what we’ve seen in the past four to five years.”

Brown said there seems to be a cycle where farmers enjoy good profit margins for four or five years, and then suffer through a period of low profit margins for another four or five years. For instance, the era 2009-13 was one of high profits, then 2014-2019 was low profits. He said farmers have been enjoying good profits recently, but unfortunately another period of low profits is once again on the horizon.