News

Kansas farmer didn’t harvest any wheat and it continues to rain

A Western Kansas farmer says drought destroyed his entire winter wheat crop and now it won’t stop raining.

“We’ve gone from having the driest three- year period of my lifetime to now having 20 inches of rain since May.”

Jim Sipes tells Brownfield the moisture was too little too late. “We had nothing. It didn’t come up out of the ground. It didn’t come up until May, and then it wasn’t fertilized so it didn’t produce any grain.  That crop was a complete failure.”

He says he did have some seed production fields that were irrigated. “It took us five weeks to harvest five circles because of all of the rain and delays.  We had a lot of fog and high humidity. (They) were conditions that we weren’t used to dealing with out here at harvest.”

He says many producers in his area are still trying to wrap up harvest ,which is now about a month behind schedule.

But, Sipes says, the rain has his corn and sorghum crops in good shape despite extreme weed pressure.”