Drought, wind storm negate ideal start to growing season

A looming drought and a historic windstorm have threatened to wipe out a perfect start to the growing season in the area.

According to the United States Drought Monitor, updated last Thursday, most of Franklin County is listed as D1, or in a moderate drought.

However, Angie Rieck-Hinz, field agronomist with Iowa State University Extension and Outreach, said that she’d estimate conditions in Franklin County to be significantly worse than the map shows.

“After driving through parts of Franklin County today and seeing pictures, the drought intensity has definitely increased,” she said.

As of last Friday, the Franklin County area has received just three-quarters of a inch of rain so far in August, nearly an inch and a half behind its average for the month to this point. From April 1 through Aug. 19, Franklin County is nearly five inches below its normal rainfall for the period.

“We’re not the driest in the state, but it’s getting drier every week,” she said.

Those dry conditions were only compounded by the unprecedented derecho event that scraped the area on Monday, August 10. While Franklin County avoided the winds that topped 120-plus miles per hour, gusts approaching 80 miles per hour were not uncommon near by.

Rieck-Hinz said that some fields in Franklin County did experience some root lodging, which means corn plants were blown over but the roots remained attached, allowing the plant to uptake nutrients.

However, a short trip south shows a different story. “We have flattened corn, snapped corn and anything that’s flattened won’t stand up, so harvest will be a challenge,” she said.

She added that the heavy winds took advantage of stalks already weakened by the worsening drought conditions.

“Where there is flattened corn, a lot of it went down because it’s dry and the crop was already burning out, so the stalk health was in poor shape,” she said. “When plants are in stress, they’ll cannibalize themselves from the bottom up, pulling everything they can to maintain nutrient needs so the stalk becomes pithy and hollow and blows over easily.”

Because of crop damage and the drought, Rieck-Hinz said an early harvest is virtually inevitable. Soybean plants have already started to change color and some corn plants are already nearing grain fill. For soybeans, she said harvest may begin as early as the first week of September. Corn plants will be later than that, as farmers want to allow plants to naturally dry in the fields before harvest.

She added that harvest will also present a new set of problems for those fields that did have significant wind damage.

“Grain quality will be an issue and harvest will be a big issue because a lot of that corn is laying down from the east and will have to be combined from one direction to pick it up,” she said. “It’s just going to be along, time consuming process in those wind impacted areas.”

Rieck-Hinz said what started as an ideal growing season in March and April has quickly created a significant amount of stress and anxiety in area producers. She said she encourages anyone who knows a farmer to check in with them and wants to remind farmers of the Iowa Helpline at 800-447-1985 should they need an additional voice.

“We have an incredible amount of personal stress,” she said. “Grain bins are smashed, we have lots of downed crops and lots of personal struggles so the thing I want to urge people to do now is reach out to people and talk to them and see how they’re doing,” she said.