soybean field

John Heisdorffer - Keota, Iowa

Farm: John grows corn and soybeans and raises 10,000 hogs on his farm south of Keota. He and his wife of 41 years, Deanna, have two daughters and one son.

Heisdorffer’s beans have been benefitting from the recent rains. They grew about two inches in just two weeks.
Heisdorffer’s beans have been benefitting from the recent rains. They grew about two inches in just two weeks.

June 23, 2014—We aren’t doing anything in the fields this week; it’s a little too damp. Mostly, I’m just mowing weeds and grass and spraying a few weeds around the farmstead. We’re doing all those odds and ends that we let go while we were planting.
One challenge I’m afraid we’ll have in the coming week is that they’re talking about rain coming through for the next four or five days again, and we would like to be able to start spraying our beans. The rain might put a damper on that, but we’ll have to wait and see.
My goals this week are to get everything – all the things that got let go while we were planting – finished. I’ve already started meeting season, but it will get busier with the American Soybean Association (ASA) board meeting and state board meeting. Those types of things are coming up in the next month.
I’ve been thinking about sustainability because I went to the National Biodiesel Board meeting last week. Biodiesel is a pretty sustainable product, and I’m president of the National Biodiesel Foundation so we educate consumers about the benefits of biodiesel including sustainability.
This week surprised me because we got some nice rains, and we didn’t get any of the flooding. That’s really been a plus. If you go to the other end of the state, they have had huge amounts of rain. I was surprised, too, at how the beans took off this week. The corn did, too, but you kind of expect that because corn likes hot, humid weather. Our beans went from 3- or 4-inches tall to 6-inches tall.