(Spencer)– There’s still concern over a lack of subsoil moisture as we head into the growing season. Paul Kassel, a Field Agronomist with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach tells KUOO news moisture levels are well below normal in every location they monitor in the region, with the exception of one near Rossie. He says sites just east of Spirit Lake and west of Estherville are especially dry…
“The normal, the spring normal is like seven and-a-half or eight inches and a lot of our sites have those. So it’s dry but the soil kind of takes its cut first, so to speak, before our lakes and streams and river kind of get filled up. So those, we’ve had some pretty good recharge in many of those, but one way or the other we need about 20 to 22 inches of moisture, so it either has to be store in the soil, which in the case, in some cases we’ve got eight inches there, and like in the case of Spirit Lake it’s more like five, four or five, I forget the exact number, and then we’re going to need, what, you know, 15 inches or so of rainfall and not all of that rainfall contributes perfectly. So again that puts a pressure on the growing season. We can get that kind of rainfall during the season, but we’re not guaranteed. And, you know, if it comes too early and it runs off or, you know, it gets really hot, dry and windy in say, you know, like July and the timing’s bad, we might get the moisture by the numbers but the timing might be bad, so it still might not impact. And we might not get that. We might have a moderate summer and have a lot of impact. So it’s kind of early to tell but to answer your question we need somewhere around 15 to 18 inches of precip during the summer to produce a normal crop.”
Kassel says producers in the affected areas may be tempted to reduce planting rates as a result, but he says that’s not a good idea…
“You know the thing is we could have a really nice June, July, August with moderate temperatures and good rainfall, so we don’t want to shoot ourselves in the foot so to speak ahead of time.”
Kassel says moisture levels are better than they were last fall. Depending upon the site, he says they’ve increased by 1.9 to 5 inches since early November.
