# The River....



## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

From Minnesota to Louisiana.....spring conditions on the Mighty Mississippi.

Regards, Mike

http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/free/news/template1&paneContentId=5&paneParentId=70104&product=/ag/news/topstories&vendorReference=cdc37f49-a12b-4710-8d92-f41326abfc58&pagination_num=1


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## Bgriffin856 (Nov 13, 2013)

We are in that watershed as well, put a piece of tile in a field that a oil company broke while building a well site. Now all I hear about is all this flooding, guess I better not put in anymore tile


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

There comes a point down south (and I are one) that you're just plain too late to plant corn... Otherwise you risk trying to pollinate with temps in the high 90's and it just won't do it, and you end up with a lot of blank ears or nearly empty cobs...

We had a year like that where it just started raining in October and rained every third day like clockwork until the middle of April... I remember it well-- it was the fall and winter of 96 and early 97, because we had an absolute KILLER drought in the spring and summer of 96, rain shut off like a tap at the end of March and didn't rain again until late-June or early July... We'd lost our cotton crop, just a tenth here and tenth there, just enough to rot the seed, only stand we had was on the very ends by the bar ditches, most of the fields were bare. Finally got insurance approval for plow-up in June and needed hay REAL bad (was fighting the gubmint to cut road ditches at that point, as there WAS NO hay available otherwise and cattle were dying by the thousands down in Rio Grande Valley and Central Texas...) Plowed the fields under and disked them flat to dilute/spread out the Trifluralin/Cotoran cotton herbicides as much as possible so I could plant something to bale... Decided to flat plant some late soybeans (we usually farm on beds here to keep stuff up out of the water) because they'd probably handle the residual cotton pre-emerge chemicals better than hay grazer (sorghum/sudan). Figured if the beans actually set pods and looked like a good crop, I'd cut the beans and haul them to the elevator and then buy hay for the winter... if the stinkbugs and stuff started gnawing on the beans too much, I'd just cut them and bale them directly for hay. Beans were doing good until the armyworms flared, and so I just put the hay mower on and laid them down and rolled them up. We had about an inch and a half of rain in June that brought them up and got them into the early pod phase when we cut them for hay.

The rain was a LITTLE more regular until late September or October, then it just rained every third day like clockwork, about an inch to an inch and a half at a time... Fields had standing water in them ALL winter long, and well into the spring of 97. I had joined the police academy and did that all fall and winter since I had lost my crops and needed SOMETHING to do... I remember it well because how wet we always were on the firing range and having to totally disassemble and clean my pistol after every range weekend. Finished the academy in the first week of May in 97, took the state exam, and had a week off before graduation. It had FINALLY quit raining around the last week of April and dried up enough to get in the field that week we were off... I plowed, hipped up the fields, disked down Trifluralin, ran the fertilizer machine over it, hipped the rows back up, and planted the field that week... Had never "shotgunned" it that quick before... EVERYBODY and their dog were in the field that week... The Extension guys told everybody "don't plant corn-- it'll be pollinating in 100 degree heat and you'll have blank ears-- switch to sorghum that can pollinate in the heat" and so there was practically NO corn around here that year (just stuff that some guys "mudded in" in the middle of April (a month late) on sandy ground between rains...

Everything else was sorghum and cotton, and everybody made a REAL GOOD crop that year-- the bugs were literally nonexistent, because basically EVERYBODY in the county planted within about a week of each other, instead of it being spread out over several weeks... by the time the bugs built up to bad levels in the early fields, all the other fields were at the same stage and would be "too far along" for them to move into and cause problems, where in a 'normal' year the later planted guys always inherit the bugs from the early planted guys, so the bugs thrive...

Man I feel for these guys, looking at a month late, but, all isn't lost-- just requires some re-thinking and maybe some re-arranging of plans... but I'd be thinking long and hard about swapping corn seed for milo seed given the options of late planting in the southern heat...

Later! OL J R


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