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Arkansas farmer says this is the crop they needed

An Arkansas farmer says he’s trying not to get too excited about this year’s soybean crop.

But, Derek Haigwood, who farms about 90 miles northeast of Little Rock, says this crop looks really good.  “With prices and yields, you almost never get those at the same time,” he says.  “With this year, if everything holds together, we’ll have one of those years.  And we needed it.  We suffered through the trade war and we’ve suffered through some odds and ends.  And this is coming together.”

He tells Brownfield they’re about halfway done with harvest and they’ve gotten this far without any disruptions from tropical storms.  “You never rest easy until those crops are out, especially corn and rice, because they can go down,” he says.  “When they go down your efficiency goes out the window.”  And despite the ease of this year’s harvest, he says it can all change in an instant.  “If you’re running 3 rice combines you can harvest about 250 acres a day on a good day,” he says.  “But you go to downed rice, and you could drop to about 80 acres a day.  It’s just so much more expensive to harvest.”

However, Haigwood says the river is at its lowest levels in recent memory, and could actually handle significant amounts of rainfall without causing too much flood damage.