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David Moseley, LSU AgCenter Soybean Specialist
The USDA-NASS survey indicated 2% of the Louisiana soybean crop was planted by March 19, 2023. This year, I walked fields planted during the first week of March. According to the five-year average, soybean planting in Louisiana usually does not begin until the fourth week of March. Favorable planting weather allowed the corn crop to be planted quickly which led to an earlier than normal beginning to the soybean planting season. Unfortunately, a freeze on March 20th caused some early planted soybean plants to be killed. There were some fields that survived the freeze. The planting progress remained ahead of the five-year average until the week ending on May 28, 2023.
On June 30, the USDA estimated the Louisiana soybean acres to be 1.12 million acres. This estimate is down 140,000 acres from 2022 and down 50,000 acres from the beginning projections for 2023.
Figure 1 shows a field that was ready for harvest by July 10, 2023. According to the USDA-NASS survey, the only year soybean acres were recorded to be harvested in July was in 2017. In 2017, 2% of the crop was harvested during the week ending on July 30.
Figure 1. A soybean field in lower Catahoula Parish ready for harvest on July 10, 2023.
A new factsheet, Desiccating Soybean for Harvest in Louisiana (lsuagcenter.com), was recently published by the LSU AgCenter.
As of July 16, 77% of the Louisiana soybean crop was rated good to excellent. The rating was the highest during the weeks ending on June 4 and 11 with 91% of the crop rated good to excellent. Due to hot and dry weather, the rating began to drop and was as low as 71% good to excellent by July 2. There were some areas catch a rain which helped the rating improve to 79% good to excellent by July 9. On July 2, 17% of the soybean crop was rated as very poor to poor; however, by July 16, only 3% was rated as poor and 0% was rated as very poor. In several fields, I have seen symptoms of manganese (Mn) deficiency after applying glyphosate. More information on Mn deficiency can be found in the article Identifying and Correcting Manganese Deficiency in Soybean (lsuagcenter.com).
