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Farmers in Kosciusko County are seeing the benefits of this summer's mild weather as they start the fall harvest.
So far, only soybeans have been harvested, and the outlook for those is excellent, said Kosciusko County Extension educator Kelly Easterday.
Where the average yield in the county for soybeans is usually around 38 bushels per acre, Easterday said, "What I hear from farmers, yields have been in the 50s, 60s, even one in the 70s."
Bill Wohead, at Mentone Agri-Center, said the last time the bean harvest was this good was in the 1980s.
"We had some good corn harvests in the early '90s, but we've never had this good of a year for beans," he said.
Why is the harvest so good this year?
"We had an ideal growing season," said Doug Smith, manager of the Leesburg Grain Elevator. "We were pretty much the garden spot of the state."
Smith said plantings were good and rains were timely during the growing season. "Corn needs rain in July and beans need rain in August," he said, "and this year that's exactly what happened."
The corn harvest is just beginning, Smith said, but it looks like it will be just as successful as the soybean harvest.
Of the few people who have begun to harvest corn, Wohead said, so far they're getting approximately 20 bushels per acre over last year, and the corn protein is about half a percent higher than last year.
But it's the bean harvest that has the farming community excited this season.
With exceptional yields and 70 cents more per bushel, Wohead said, "It's going to heal a lot of wounds. A lot of people are still hurting from 1988 when we had the drought."
