Local farmer says harvest season is looking good, but weather worries him

IRETON, Iowa (KCAU) — Farmers are hitting the fields for the 2024 harvest season, and one producer told KCAU 9 that it's looking to be a good year for crops.

"It's been pretty awesome," Ireton farmer Tyler Meyer said. "We've had really good sunshine, we've had dry weather, we haven't been fighting any rain and stuff like that."

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Since last Monday, Tyler Meyer has been out in the field day and night harvesting his crops.

"Bean-wise this year, we're having really nice yields," he said. "Last year we had a heck of a lot of white mold, had a lot of disease in this area. This year we do not have that. The corn yields that I have heard, we are down a little bit and that's because of some major disease that was coming in late season, so this area is going to be off on corn."

Meyer attributes this year's yield to good rainfall.

"Rain makes grain and we had water early on, and in this little where we are at, we actually had rain as of two weeks ago, we had a half inch of rain," Meyer said. "Fall is a good time to be somewhat dry, us farmers can get to our stuff and get to it efficiently and stuff, but we are concerned about the winds and the dryness that's out there."

High winds and dry climate are perfect conditions for field fires and can occur just by farmers doing their job.

"So machinery, definitely any type of internal combustion engine that produces heat produces a spark," Garrett Soldati with Sioux City Fire Rescue said. "Mufflers, exhaust systems that tend to run hot can obviously ignite material that's dry."

"In the last five to six years, it seems to be normal in the area, that there's something within a 10-15 mile radius that the local fire department has to respond to," Meyer said.

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Several Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota counties are under a red flag warning , and fire officials emphasized that people should avoid starting fires Monday.

"Today is not the greatest day to burn, and that if something does ignite, it's going to move very rapidly," Soldati said. "And therefore you need to be well aware, have mitigation efforts."

If you find yourself on a road with farm equipment, Meyer says you should be patient with farmers due to their slow equipment.