By Jessica Domel
Field Editor
For months, farmers, ranchers and consumers alike prayed for rain. It arrived, and we rejoiced together. But then, for some, the rain didn’t stop.
Fields flooded. Planters and harvesters couldn’t get in to do regular field work. The rain became both a blessing and a curse.
“The corn crop was better than we thought it would be and sorghum was worse,” George Hood Jr., Victoria County Farm Bureau President, said. “Beans did pretty well.”
Sorghum in the area is down about 1,000 pounds an acre due to the rain.
We were having heavy rains about the time it was pollinating, and it didn’t pollinate well,” Hood said.
Farmers in that area were also several weeks behind picking cotton due to the wet weather earlier this year. The area received a large rain after the crop was defoliated and it strung the cotton out, but the fiber didn’t fall out of the boll to the point it couldn’t be harvested.
Further north in Guadalupe County, corn quality is good, but yields are slightly down due to the wet weather.
“The river bottom land, the lighter soil, has been doing really well, but our good, black soil, has been doing not as good because of the rain we had during the summer time. A lot of it drowned out, didn’t get tall and didn’t mature like it should have,” Trey Hartman, Guadalupe County farmer, said on the Texas Farm Bureau (TFB) Radio Network.
The kernels on some of the corn are smaller, but the quality is good on other fields.
I think we hurt a lot of yields,” Harman said. “A lot of this corn had the potential for making over 100, from 100 to 140 bushels, but the rain just really impacted a lot of the blackland down here and a lot of the blackland in Central Texas.”
Some rust was found in Guadalupe County later in the season as well.
“I don’t think it affected the yields. I think it was far enough along,” Hartman said.
Farmer Butch Aycock in Collin County wasn’t as lucky.
“This year has been one of the most difficult that I think all farmers in North Texas will certainly remember,” Aycock said. Approximately half of Aycock’s wheat was never harvested due to the rain. Corn planting was delayed by a month as some parts of the area saw about 20 inches of rain, which severely damaged the corn.
“It’s been uphill and difficult from too much rain since then,” Aycock said.
In one field, Aycock’s yields were five percent of what they usually are—down to less than five bushels per acre.
“The higher producing corn fields got hit the worst,” Aycock said. “The wetter the field, the worse the wet feet became. The poor, marginal, land has actually got the best corn on it, and that almost never happens.”
Despite the setbacks Texas farmers are seeing, late spring and early summer rains did help the Lone Star State. Rivers and reservoirs are full. Hay and forage are abundant. Trees and lawns are recovering.
But like the old saying goes, “Don’t like the weather in Texas? Just stay a minute. It’ll change.”