Cyndi's Two Cents

Weather woes

Commentary.

It’s dry. Bone dry. The kind of dry that I remember from my childhood when the jimson weed leaves were curled, the grass crispy, and it hurt my nose to breathe in the hot air.

That was the opening paragraph in the column I wrote for this page three years ago today.  The story is much different now than it was during the first official week of summer in 2012.  Then, farmers in the area had started chopping their corn for silage and given up their soybean crop for dead.  Today, there are fields of corn and soybeans standing in water in some areas, and acres of unplanted corn and soybean fields in others.

I live in mid-Missouri.  The severity of flooding and result of days and weeks of rain and overcast skies varies throughout the Midwest.  On our farm, flash flooding took out fences and gates and left our commercial gardens standing in water.  We can repair the fences and replace gates, but the weeks and months invested in starting the plants from seed to carefully handling the tender seedlings before planting in the gardens cannot be replaced.  Heirloom eggplant, pepper and tomato crop failures earlier in the season can be managed, but at this late date, time is not on our side.

This time in 2012, hay making was long over and many of the cattlemen in our area had re-installed the bale forks that came off of their pick-ups once the spring rains turned the grass green. By early to mid-June, scorched pastures during the drought of 2012 forced many neighbors to feed big round bales of hay to their cow herds and supplement their rations with extra grain.

Fast forward to 2015 and those who still raise cattle have had few hay-making windows in the weather system.  A rain-free forecast a month ago sent many farmers to their hayfields, where the grass received a good soaking before it was tedded and raked and baled.  Several farmers I know said they would rather roll up the low-quality hay than leave it lay in the field where it would choke out new growth.

Cattle aren’t kicking up dust when they make their way, single file, to the mineral feeder as they did 3 years ago.  Instead they are cutting some deep tracks in areas where the sod is saturated with water. So far, 2012 and 2015 are just about as different from one another as you can get.

I closed the column I wrote for this page 3 years ago with words that ring true in droughts and floods and everything in between:

Many farmers today are armed with a toolbox full of new hybrids, pesticides, herbicides, tillage equipment, the best fly control and nutritional plans for your livestock, computer programs designed for precision application of herbicides, fertilizer and pesticides. GPS can be used for field mapping, soil sampling, farm planning, tractor guidance, crop scouting, variable rate applications, and yield mapping.

Yet still we are unable to control the one factor that has the most impact on our livelihood: Weather.

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