It’s a cool Tuesday evening, and Neal Ballance is busy shelling corn in a 450-acre field in Simpson County, helping his uncle John Ballance.

The Ballances have been in corn for a few weeks, and the harvest has done well. However, due to a prolonged period of inadequate or no rainfall for several weeks, soybeans in the Ballance fields and in fields across the region are hurting.

While piloting a large John Deere combine through the cornfield, Ballance told the Daily News a “really good” yield on soybeans is around 60 bushels per acre.

“If we can hit anything over that 60 bushel an acre window, that’s kind of what we strive for every year,” he said.

Soybeans are generally planted in the summer months, just a couple months after corn is planted, and are harvested, or “threshed,” around mid-October or November. Most of the beans the Ballances will harvest this year are “double cropped,” meaning they were planted after spring wheat was harvested.

Uses for the crop include animal feed, which utilizes a “meal” product inside the seeds. This includes livestock and, in some cases, fish used in aquaculture.

Oils from soybeans are also utilized and other features of the plant are put on the export market.

Ballance said soybeans enter their reproductive period around August and September, right as the weather dried up. He is hopeful a productive soybean harvest could still happen though – if only rain would increase in the coming weeks.

“We’re already hurt on the hills, but I feel like we could be in that 50 bushel per acre range if we get the rain,” Ballance said. “If it (stops) raining, even more so than it already has, we could get in the 30 or 40 bushel per acre range.”

Ballance said it’s for this reason they have crop insurance. But even with a payout, he said, “you’re still just trying to break even.”

“It’s not going to pay you on a mediocre crop. It’s going to pay you on a below-average crop,” he said. “There’s no insurance company out there that’ll insure you for 100%. You try to insure a percentage of your crop, and typically that’ll be anywhere from 75% to 85% of your crop.”

Alex Mann, who works with the Seldom Rest Farms farming operation owned by his father, Randy, compared the issues with soybeans this year to farming during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When everybody else had to stop working (and) everything shut down, we couldn’t afford to shut down,” Mann said. “We had everything on the line.”

He said much of Seldom Rest’s full-season soybeans – those planted earlier in the year – will likely be OK, but it’s double crop beans, like those planted by the Ballances, that will suffer. He predicted issues with soil quality and a simple lack of beans to harvest will come up this year.

“They never had a chance to ever get caught up and ever fully develop,” Mann said. “They’re trying right now as hard as they can, but (with) no rain in the past month, they’ve grown up to a certain extent and stopped and haven’t developed.”

Due to high rainfall amounts in the spring, Mann said, some fields did not fully dry out until well into June. By late summer, he said, it was “like someone turned the light switch.” Mann said by his calendar, the last time there was adequate rainfall was Aug. 20.

Other issues arise in excessively dry fields. Mann said while they harvest corn, they are blowing dust and small particles off of combines and other implements to cut down on the risk of sparks igniting field fires.

He said being in the field is “very scary right now.”

“It (doesn’t) take much to start a spark,” he said. “It’s just a very scary time.”

The lack of rainfall has resulted in various burn bans across the region.

Jerald Brotzge, a professor of meteorology at Western Kentucky University and the state’s climatologist, said the region for a decade saw an “abnormally wet period,” with 2018, 2019, and 2020 coming in as the second, fifth and eighth wettest years on record.

While each year was a little bit drier than the last, the drying trend ramped up. Brotzge said 2023 was the 91st wettest year on record. Statewide, Kentucky typically sees 48 inches of rainfall per year.

“This year, we’re right about average,” Brotzge said. “The western third of the state, roughly, is running about four inches above normal … and then the Bluegrass region, which is Lexington to Louisville and north to Cincinnati, is running a quarter inch below normal.”

This has meant increased rainfall in the spring months that created the sixth wettest May on record, Brotzge said. He said during summer months, much of the precipitation comes in the form of convection, which results in localized, isolated downpours and storms.

“Your neighbor across town can get an inch of rain from a storm, and you can miss the entire weekend of rain,” Brotzge said. “If you’re lucky, you could get hit by several rounds of thunderstorms and get an inch or more of rainfall, whereas you could be missed by all that and get zero.”

He said this, combined with increased evaporation of water during the summer, “magnifies the impacts” on agriculture.

Remnants of Hurricane Francine, which weakened into a tropical depression after impacting the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, was forecast last week to bring some much-needed rain into the region. Phillips said significant rainfall, even this late, could help soybeans rebound.

Taylor Thompson, commodity marketing specialist for Kentucky Farm Bureau, said even just a small amount of rain would help some crop varieties.

“The genetics that we have in a lot of our commodities these days are very resilient and have really kind of been tailored to handle drought conditions pretty well,” Thompson said. “Only time will truly tell when you get that product out of the ground, but some of these late rains that you’ll see could definitely be a benefit.”

Jason Phillips, an extension agent with the Simpson County Extension Office, agrees, saying rain and irrigation for crops is the “most limiting factor” when it comes to yields.

“We’re kind of at a critical point with our soybeans,” Phillips said.

Soybean reproductive growth is broken down into eight stages. Phillips said generally, the beans planted earlier this year are by now beginning to grow seeds, the portion of the plant that is actually harvested.

“Most of them are in that … growth stage, which is making the seed, and it requires a lot of precipitation,” Phillips said. “If you have a drought situation, that plant can’t fill those pods and will actually abort and not make any beans.”

Currently, prices for soybeans are $9.77 per bushel. In September 2023, prices stood at $13.39 per bushel and the year before that, $14.26.

“Obviously, the price is not good,” Phillips said. “If yields are down, it’s going to be a hard deal, because input prices are at an all-time high.”

Phillips said input prices include costs of fertilizer, equipment, seed and everything else “put into the crop.” While it’s hard to know how heavy the impact is going to be since prices fluctuate, Phillips said “it’s going to be very stressful, very tight” for soybean farmers.

However, one thing is certain.

“They need rain, and they need it ASAP,” he said.