Farmers Again Fighting The Weather

We’re get­ting win­ter weather, and yet, the fall har­vest sea­son is still under­way. Many area farm­ers are way behind this year, after the late start they got last spring.

On top of that, there was a lot of rain last month, and the soil became sat­u­rated, which pre­vented farm­ers from even get­ting on their fields to start the har­vest on time.

On a pos­i­tive note, farm­ers report that over­all qual­ity of the corn is good, and the yields are bet­ter than usual this year. How­ever, soy­beans are down a bit more than usual.

Last year, most farm­ers were done in Octo­ber. This year, the har­vest has been long and drawn out because of the wet weather.

Accord­ing to infor­ma­tion from the National Weather Ser­vice, in May and June the pre­cip­i­ta­tion received in the region was more than nor­mal with June hav­ing approx­i­mately 1.65 inches more of pre­cip­i­ta­tion. Both August and Sep­tem­ber had pre­cip­i­ta­tion that was more than 2 inches above nor­mal.

Nation­wide, USDA stated in its crop pro­duc­tion report on Nov. 10 that corn pro­duc­tion is fore­casted at 14.4 bil­lion bushels with yields expected to aver­age 173.4 bushels per acre.