Wewild":1tc7xi6t said:
A wee bit of rain fell in the last 2 days. Maybe enough to sink some rye in the ground and pray for better times.
It is hard to imagine we still got less than an inch.
Life is good. We will make it still.
I guess what goes around comes around. This is from when we had it good and others didn't.
Man I wish we could send it to ya! We got lucky here and didn't get hardly any out of Hurricane Humberto. I had to go toward the coast to the chiropractor on Wednesday and went through a blinding rainstorm between here and there. We're 57% above normal for the year so far in precipitation, and that puts us at about 60 inches or so for the year, with another three months to go! Course it's better than last year, when we were DRY! Cows at least have four wheel drive and can get out there and graze, even if they are in mud up to their knees; it's hard to eat anything when there's little out there but dust! It's really gotten to where it's feast or famine here, which is why I got out of row cropping, that and the exhorbitant expenses nowdays. Guys around here are just sick, because they had beautiful grain sorghum crops in the field back in early July, when they should have been combining, and it started raining and kept on raining every second or third day, an inch, or two, or three at a time, and it never dried up enough to cut. Some guys that planted REAL early managed to get it cut pretty much on time, but everybody else was sunk. Most guys just mudded it out last month, which is a full month after it should have been harvested. I've seen several fields that STILL haven't been harvested, but the grain has turned a dull rusty gray now and is a total loss. Even guys that mudded it out have probably seriously screwed up their fields, because once you pack this heavy black clay it takes YEARS to get it worked out again... I know from sad experience. The corn is usually combined here the third week of July, and again most was gathered at least a month later, and mudded out to boot. Some still hasn't been combined. Cotton here should have been started being defoliated around the first or second week of August, and here we are a month later and still the fields have standing water and most haven't been defoliated. Some have (optimistically) maybe trying to get some sun down to the ground but it'll probably all leaf back out before the ground gets dry. There are more than a few fields around here with 6 and even 7 foot tall cotton, and most of it that tall won't have hardly anything on it, since it went rank growth. Cotton that tall will shade the ground forever and be VERY difficult to pick, what little is there. Some actually looks pretty good, in the 4 foot high or so range, but that rank stuff very rarely makes anything.
I cut hay almost two weeks ago, stuff was ready to cut back in late June/early July but water standing on the pasture so that wouldn't work. It had gone to pot but what can you do? I cut it and got 40 rolls but then had trouble with the baler and didn't get the last 15 rolled before it dumped a couple inches of rain on us, and then rained another inch about 4-5 days later. I had it raked and went and rolled it over and it looked surprisingly good on bottom, just a few bad spots where there wasn't enough stubble to keep it out of the water and so I let it dry and went on and baled it up just to test out the new baler parts and get it off the meadow, and filler if need be...
Just can't win for losing this year... OL JR
