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kansasfarmer's blog

May 2009 - Posts

  • Still flustered.

    Finally today the sun came out, after a very light rain this morning.  For the first time in what seems like forever the ground dried out on top, and you could begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel, in other words without anymore rain we might be in the field by Saturday....but...we have heavy rain forecast for tonight. 

    The grain trade seems to be taking this all in stride, understandable if my mainly pasture corner of the world was the only part of this nation unable to plant, but that is far from the case, wet unplanted fields stretch from here to Indiana.  Moreever in Texas where the combines will soon be rolling if they aren't already the USDA rates the wheat crop at 75% poor to very poor according to the radio at noon, and our Kansas crop is forecast to be 330 million bushels, off the average of 350 million bushels.  The grain trade figures US farmers pulled a good crop out of a disasterous start in 2008 and we will do it again.  Of course, we were helped by cool wet weather all summer, if we get a severe hot dry snap in July or August, the summer grain markets could be very interesting and very wild.

  • Flustered

    Well, we just picked up a half inch of rain in a little over 6 minutes.  The forecast is for rain every day but one for the next 7 days.  Our soil is saturated after 6 inches of rain over the last 2 weeks, and I am one of the lucky ones, about 12 miles north of here they got 6 inches in just one rain.  I was convinced all winter we would have a dry spring, and March certainly led me to believe I was going to be right.  However the taps got turned on in April, and for the first time in my memory May 1st rolls around with not one single kernel of corn in the ground on my farm.  As a rule we feel that May 15th is when you would like to be finishing planting, with the forecast we have today it may well be I will have to make the decision to start around May 15th.  At this point other than we can't get anything done(including turn out cattle, I have 1400 acres of pasture without a hoof on it) we are not critical because we can switch over to grain sorghum for a feed grain, there are alot of people who don't even like to plant it before the 1st of June.  What is an issue is rather than pace things out like we would all prefer to on our mostly mixed livestock and crop farms in eastern Kansas, we are going to be looking at planting corn, beans and milo all at once, turning out, and putting up hay in a very narrow window, with wheat harvest about 50 days away.  Given the relative ease with which it rains this spring, I would guess I will spend most of the next 2 months being very flustered. 

    The most remarkable thing about all of this is, we are looking at 3 wet springs in a row, very unusual for Kansas.  At the rate we are going, we may also be looking at 3 poor wheat crops in a row, since wheat does not like this warm humid weather.

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