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Iowa farmer begins 2022 corn harvest

Northwest Iowa farmer Kelly Nieuwenhuis says he’s optimistic about his corn crop despite a year of drought-related challenges.

“We’ve started on our first field and it’s probably going to be our worst yielding field,” he said. “It’s 16% moisture and 58-pound test weight, so overall I think it’s going to be pretty good quality. I think our yields will go up from there.”

He tells Brownfield he doesn’t expect too many delays from Mother Nature this harvest season. “The way the 10-day extended forecast looks, it’s going to be dry,” he said. “With this dry corn, we’re just going to keep filling bins. We did book a lot of propane here a few months ago thinking we were going to have to dry a lot of corn. It turns out that we’re probably not going to need that.”

Nieuwenhuis raises corn and soybeans in O’Brien County.