It’s bad enough having to deal with dry weather and stressed corn. It’s even tougher during the dry weather to suddenly receive six inches of rainfall in 90 minutes!
“I think the old saying is ‘you’re never more than two weeks from a drought,’ so, if we don’t get anymore [rain] in the next ten days we’ll be ready for another round of – not six inches in an hour-and-a-half, but a good inch would be nice,” says Rob Schuman with Specialty Hybrids. He is based out of Whitley County just west of Fort Wayne.
Rob says it’s been a roller coaster ride this summer for farmers in northeastern Indiana when it comes to weather.
“We had a bad storm go through with a lot of wind about a month ago now and [it] took down a lot of trees and buildings,” according to Schuman. “The only good that came out of that was we got about an inch of rain so most of my area was in decent shape, but we were just starting to get dry eight [or] nine days ago [and] the crop was starting to show some stress, and [the meteorologists] were calling [for] rain. We had our fingers crossed. Then we got six-plus inches in about an hour-and-a-half which was too much too fast.”
Rob says the rain that got dumped in his area has caused some headaches for farmers.
“We had done some replanting from previously when he had some drowned-out spots and they had come up and were just starting to look nice and they’re gone again.”
Even though the forecast calls for another dry period over the next week or so, the corn and soybeans around Whitley County have shown some resiliency.
“Our crop, what didn’t get obliterated by the ‘flood’, looks very good, so we’re very fortunate,” Rob says. “Now we just hope that the weather kind of moderates itself here as we move forward the rest of the growing season and we get some fungicides applied and a second pass on beans finished up and head towards harvest.”
Just how much yield does Rob expect to be lost due to challenging weather conditions?
“I guess I’d say I’ll tell you in three or four months! I don’t think anybody can really predict. [It reminds me of] that old saying a farmer told me once that I’ve repeated many times since: ‘If it was easy, everybody would do it!’ So, we just have to do the best we can, control we can control and trust God and hope for the best.”
Click BELOW to hear C.J. Miller’s news report on how challenging weather conditions have affected crops in northeastern Indiana.
Click BELOW to hear the FULL interview with Rob Schuman with Specialty Hybrids as he describes the challenging weather conditions that farmers have faced so far this summer in Whitley County and across northeastern Indiana.
