(Lakefield, Mn.)– As if high diesel prices weren’t a big enough issue for farmers, Mother Nature is posing a challenge of her own. The extremely wet weather is delaying the start of the harvest season throughout the region. Jim Nesseth of Extended Ag Services says there’s especially concern over the impact it’s having on corn…
“The big challenge the way it’s setting up for this fall is just getting soil conditions dry enough to support the combines and grain carts and tractors. So we’ve just got to wait until that happens, and yeah, it’s, the big concern I think a lot of producers have is stalk quality in some of those corn fields and so they want to get that out as soon as they can but we’re just going to have to be patient and wait until the soil conditions are dry enough so we can maybe attack some of those corn fields.”
He says stalk rot has been documented in a number of locations…
“As a whole we’ve got a fair amount of corn that’s broke over and it’s really in a drought stressed area, Steve, where we’ve seen some of the most severe damage there. So that will be a big concern but once things dry out and the soybeans are ready that will take precedence over anything, you know. We need to take those beans when they’re ready to go so we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope we don’t have any big wind events that will lay a lot of that corn over and break some over.”
And when it comes to the average harvest dates, Nesseth says it isn’t time to push the panic button just yet…
“If we can just get that water faucet to turn off, I mean we’d be kind of right on schedule. I mean if we can get going with harvest the end of September, the first part of October, we’re in good shape. But just the challenge that we have this year is just with that standability and stalk quality on the corn, so we’re just going to want to get that as soon as we can.”
Nesseth says another danger by trying to get into wet fields is soil compaction.
