Growing up decades ago on a little farm, I can remember sitting in the small town Leota, Minnesota cafe with my dad listening to him talk with the other 'old boy' farmers. Harvest was completed and the bushel results were in.

As far as the corn crop went, if the yield was 100 bushels per acre, it was a banner year, a bumper crop!

A hundred bushels per acre was the goal, the top of the proverbial mountain.

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Now, a hundred bushels would be a disaster, one bummer of an agricultural year. Yeah, times have certainly changed.

Over the weekend I was traveling out and about and man...the crops looked pretty darn good! In fact, soybean harvest is underway in some spots. And the corn? Gee, I thought, I wonder if this could be a record year?

Well, if it is, it'll beat the record set in South Dakota just last year. I was browsing around one of my favorite websites thisisfarming.org and discovered last year corn production in South Dakota averaged a record 162 bushels per acre. 162? Wow, the boys back there in the cafe in the 'old days' would have spit out their coffee and fell off the stool!

There's a lot of cool information about how important corn is to our state, but the one that caught my eye is the 193 million bushels we exported last year. Suffice to say, those corn fields you drive by on your way to Grandma's house are integral to South Dakota in more ways than one.

Be safe while harvesting and for us 'town folk', when you're out driving give that farm machinery on the road a wide (and safe) berth.

 

Barn House

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