RELIEF?

Recent rains may have turned the tide

By RYAN CARTER, CARLETA WEYRICH and ANDREA CHAFFIN for ACRES South­west Ohio

Has the recent show­ers and storms brought needed relief to south­ern Ohio farmers?

Maybe some, but maybe not enough.

The crop progress report released this week from the United States Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture indi­cate that Ohio is still under sig­nif­i­cant drought stress. Corn across the state is 82 per­cent silked com­pared to 23 per­cent at the same date last year, and 28 per­cent ahead of the five-year average.

Of the 82 per­cent of corn that has silked, 12 per­cent of that corn has reached the dough stage of devel­op­ment com­pared to a five-year aver­age of only 4 per­cent. The dough stage of corn develop occurs around 24–28 days after pol­li­na­tion and has received that name due to the “doughy” con­sis­tency of the inner kernels.

Given the extremely dry con­di­tions that have made this a stress­ful year for area grow­ers, the over­all crop in Fayette County has pro­gressed fairy well, accord­ing to local agri­cul­ture officials.

“All grow­ing sea­son we have been talk­ing about the early plant­ing and how phys­i­o­log­i­cally we are close to a month ahead of pre­vi­ous grow­ing sea­sons,” said Adam Shep­ard, the Agri­cul­ture and Nat­ural Resources Exten­sion Edu­ca­tor at the Ohio State Uni­ver­sity Exten­sion Office’s Fayette County branch. “Well, this sea­son like all oth­ers has thrown us a few curve­balls. Although we have started receiv­ing some sig­nif­i­cant rain­falls that will help the crops immensely, rain­fall totals have var­ied greatly across the county.

“Although the corn is sig­nif­i­cantly ahead of last year, that does not mean that the crop is not in excel­lent con­di­tion,” said Shep­ard. “Over two-thirds of the state’s corn is char­ac­ter­ized as any­where from very poor to fair con­di­tion with only 15 per­cent of corn being clas­si­fied as good or excel­lent. At this time, it is still too early to know for sure exactly how much the drought and extreme heat has hurt this year’s crop.”

The soy­bean crop across the state is in slightly bet­ter shape than the corn is, accord­ing to the report. In terms of devel­op­ment, the soy­beans in the state are at around 78 per­cent bloomed which is 46 per­cent ahead of this date one year ago and 18 per­cent ahead of the five-year average.

Of the 78 per­cent of plants bloom­ing, 21 per­cent of those plants have begun set­ting pods for grain fill. With last year’s late plant­ing, that total was only 4 per­cent of the crop set­ting pods com­pared to the 13 per­cent five-year average.

Over­all, the crop con­di­tion is very sim­i­lar to corn with around 80 per­cent of the state’s soy­bean crop being clas­si­fied as “very poor to fair.”

“Finally we must remem­ber that while the lack of rain­fall is detri­men­tal to our county’s crops, it is also extremely impor­tant to the pas­ture and hay acres of the county,” said Shep­ard. “Grow­ers count on green pas­tures to feed the ani­mals over the sum­mer while also allow­ing them to store hay for feed­ing dur­ing the win­ter months. The heat and lack of rain­fall has also reduced the quan­tity and qual­ity of pas­tures and lim­ited the amount of hay being made to this point in the grow­ing season.”

While the actual effects of the summer’s heat and inad­e­quate rain­fall have yet to be real­ized, timely rain­falls and more favor­able tem­per­a­tures can still have a pos­i­tive effect on grain fill in both corn and soy­beans, Shep­ard said.

The big ques­tion at the Adams County Fair in mid-July was “do you have any hay for sale?” — but they weren’t look­ing for hay to feed the fair projects.

“We’re get­ting reports that the pas­tures are in bad shape, and some peo­ple are already feed­ing hay to their live­stock,” said Phil Swayne, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Adams County office of the Farm Ser­vice Agency. “The USDA has released CRP acreage in any county listed as a D-0, or abnor­mally dry, on the U.S. Drought Mon­i­tor for emer­gency har­vest of hay and graz­ing. We are cur­rently a D-1 or mod­er­ate drought.”

“I got a total of 0.61 of an inch of rain dur­ing fair week — I’m thank­ful I got what I got,” said Roger Rhone­mus, who lives on Comp­ton Hill Road in the cen­tral sec­tion of Adams County. “I have a clover– tim­o­thy field in front of the house. It was pretty brown — there may not be any grass left, but I noticed the field looks more green since the rain.”

Spotty is the word that best describes the con­di­tion of Adams County grain crops — all depen­dent on how much rain fell where dur­ing the past two months. Accord­ing to rough esti­mates, there are 18,250 acres of corn and 18,890 acres of soy­beans planted this year in the county.

Corn is stressed more than soy­beans, accord­ing to Swayne and Rhonemus.

“The corn has been tas­sel­ing and pol­li­nat­ing — a time when mois­ture is impor­tant, but there hasn’t been any to speak of,” Swayne said.

“There’s a poten­tial the yields will be all over the scale,” said Rhone­mus. “The soy­beans will be O.K. if we get rain — it’s not over until we get to the first of September.”

Tony Nye, OSU Exten­sion edu­ca­tor in Clin­ton County for agri­cul­ture and nat­ural resources, said that while rain­fall dur­ing the July 21 week­end helped local crops, it wasn’t enough to put the area in the clear.

“We’re def­i­nitely not out of the woods,” he said. “Pray for rain.”

Nye esti­mates that the county could lose 20 per­cent of its corn crop.

“Some of the corn has def­i­nitely been hurt because of the impact of the drought. The dam­age is done; it can’t be turned around or reserved.”

Most of the dam­age is due to lack of pol­li­na­tion, min­i­mal pol­li­na­tion or in some cases spo­radic pol­li­na­tion because of vari­at­ing field by field con­di­tions, he said. Many dif­fer­ences depend on whether ground is flat or rolling, and the type of soil. Addi­tion­ally, some vari­eties of crops han­dle stress dif­fer­ently. As for the end result, it’s all vari­able depend­ing on what rain­fall the area con­tin­ues to get.

“In regards to corn, the dam­age is done if there’s dam­age out there,” he said.

Expec­ta­tions are a bit more opti­mistic for the soy­bean crop. The rain­fall was a “God­send” for it, but it’s too early to know its poten­tial, Nye said.

“That’s exactly what the beans needed. They’re so depen­dant on the next month of weather. As to the final result, it’s a true guess­ing game as to what the poten­tial is. We got very ben­e­fi­cial rain last week, but we need it every week.”

The worst drought Nye expe­ri­enced was in 1988. Clin­ton County still man­aged to aver­age 100 bushels. This sea­son may yield some­where around 135 bushels, Nye said.

“I don’t think we’re as bad as that year, but we have areas of the state that are as bad if not worse,” he said.

Still, there is so much vari­abil­ity from one end of a field to another, it’s dif­fi­cult to guage what the result will be, Nye said.

“We’re doing lots of hop­ing,” he said. “Until we get the com­bines out at har­vest time, we won’t know how bad the end result is with the drought.

We’re at a crit­i­cal point. We need rain — not a shower here or there.”

Posted by Tina Murdock on Aug 9 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.