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Nebraska farmers celebrate a near drought-busting rain

Mother Nature has brought widespread relief from drought for some farmers in the Western Corn Belt.

“I’m not going to complain one bit about the planters sitting here waiting for a sunny day to get back out in the field.”

South-Central Nebraska farmer Randy Uhrmacher tells Brownfield he’s received about three inches of rain recently. “It gives us a little bit of a recharge on our subsoil moisture now. That’s kind of what we’ve needed to get us past knee-high on these crops. I said if we didn’t get any rain and we were on the same weather patterns we were in, dryland crops would not have made it to knee high.”

August Fishell says he started irrigating before planting got underway. “Which I’ve never done, and we watered quite a bit. We made two circles with a quite few pivots where we could.” 

But, he says, “We got about 2.60 inches between the last two rains. We’re still in the drought.  It will take awhile to get out of it.  That topsoil should be a lot better than what was before.  We’re happy about it, but we have a lot of making up to do.”  

Uhrmacher grows corn and soybeans near Hastings and Fishell farmers near Axtell.