(La Porte County, IN) - Recent heavy rain storms are making what’s been a challenging growing season for area farmers a bit tougher at the start of the fall harvest.
Farmers are looking at several days to over a week now before their soggy fields are dry enough to begin or resume harvesting.
“It’s been a trying year and it looks like it’s going to continue that way,” said Mark Parkman, who raises corn, soybeans, hay and cattle in the Westville area.
“It seems like a year of extremes,” said Matt Schafer of LaCrosse.
Schafer, who raises corn and soybeans, said he received six inches of rain over a five day period since September 16 with about half of the amount coming over the weekend.
Similar rainfall totals in previous months caused delays in spring planting and likely some yield reductions in spots during the growing season from ponding in the fields and corn stalks knocked over by high winds.
More recently, though, farmers were hoping for rain but not this much after receiving hardly any precipitation over the past five weeks.
“Either we get a lot of rain, too much to handle in a short period of time, or nothing,” said Kyle Jansma, a grain merchandiser at the Wheatfield Grain Co.
“We went from pretty darn dry to pretty darn wet. Everything is saturated at this point,” said Parkman, who reported similar rainfall totals at his farm.
Farmers don’t seem too concerned right now, though, about getting all of their crops out of the ground before winter begins to set in but wish the weather forecast this week was much warmer and sunnier.
Jeff Mitzner of Wanatah was hoping to begin harvesting his corn and soybeans before the rains but has to wait until the ground becomes dry enough to operate tractors pulling combines and other heavy machinery.
“We’ll be ready as soon as it dries out,” he said.
Mitzner said the heavy rains on what was becoming dry ground will help soybeans and maybe some corn plants reach maturity during the final growth stages. He said the rain also could have knocked some of the leaves off soybean plants, which makes harvesting them a little easier.
“Actually, we needed the moisture so it helped us more than hurt us,” Mitzner said.
Jansma said he hasn’t heard farmers express much concern about the heavy rains this season having a negative impact on yields but there were pockets especially in the low-lying areas that became too wet at times.
As of Monday, Jansma said his company had not received any harvested crops from farmers to gauge yields and crop conditions this season but growers seem pretty optimistic.
“Farmers feel pretty good about this year’s crop,” he said.
Schafer expects some yield loss but he didn’t want to estimate how his crops performed until after he begins to harvest.
“If we learning anything from this year it’s don’t try to guess. You’re probably going to get it wrong anyway,” he said.
