The heavy rains we’ve received this fall have filled up lakes and ponds and helped to replenish sub soil moisture, but we wondered if maybe it could be a case of getting too much of a good thing. Billy Pagach farms in Milam County.
“It threw us back on field work. We really got behind. It was about a week, and then we got more showers and it threw us another week and then another week. The twenty inches that our neighboring county had gotten, Robertson County, they had gotten, which was quite a bit. Now we got possibly about fifteen or sixteen inches.”
Pagach was planting winter wheat when the rains came.
“We were head over heels in planting wheat. Our land was already prepared and ready to plant wheat, and when it gets that wet, the disc will choke up on you, and so on and so forth. You just can’t go any more, it’s just impossible. You have to wait until drier conditions exist.”
Crop Insurance requires wheat be planted by December 15th.
“The rainfall, I’m not going to gripe about it. We need it. We need it awful bad. Some of the lands that we work, they got washed a little bit, but it’s to the point that we can still work with it, and we just have to work around it.”
Delayed planting may cause some farmers to change their plans, expecting wheat planted late to have less than normal yields.
“We have land set aside for that wheat planting and just because we got this big rain I am not going to change my plans. Some people may go in and plant less wheat and plant corn, but in my particular case the way we’re doing, we’re going to go ahead with our intention of wheat planting and stick with it.”
Source - http://www.kbtx.com/
