(Lakefield, Mn.)– Fieldwork across the region remains at a standstill for the most part as a result of the recent rain. Jim Nesseth of Extended Ag Services in Lakefield says most of the ground is saturated…
“You can just pretty much tell that by all the rivers and the creeks, but we are starting to see some of that water recede, the ponding is starting to go down. We see a few gray spots in the fields and so, you know, if you can just put together a stretch of a week of dry weather, hopefully we can get in there and try and finish planting soybeans and in some cases some corn.”
If that doesn’t happen soon, Nesseth says producers, especially those with corn yet to plant, will likely be forced to consider prevent plant options through crop insurance. He says once things DO dry out, fieldwork will be pretty much non-stop…
“We’re going to be playing a little bit of catch up with some of the weed control and certainly there’s a lot of corn that needs to be side dressed with some nitrogen. I think we probably have, definitely we’re going to have some potential nitrogen loss so we’re going to really take a serious look at maybe adding some extra nitrogen on some of these fields that are saturated and don’t have as good drainage as we can lose some nitrogen through denitrofication. And then there’s the hay crop. We haven’t, I don’t think there’s, I think I saw maybe one field over the weekend that was cut for alfalfa, but that’s just waiting to happen. And of course as each day goes on and that first cutting gets a little more mature, the feed value goes down, so hopefully we can get that put up here in the next week.”
Unfortunately, additional rain is in the forecast which will likely further complicate things.
