For Farmers, A Year`s Worth of Rain
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| Retha Colclasure |
| 6/16/2009 |
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| There`s one cardinal rule about being a farmer in western North Dakota. Never complain about the rain. But after this week`s downpours, some farmers might be hitting their breaking point. When the rain first started falling on Gabe Brown`s fields near Menoken around 6:00 p.m. last night, he wasn`t too worried about the light sprinkle. But within fifteen minutes, it started pouring, and didn`t stop until he had over a foot of rain in his rain gauge by midnight. "I`ve never been through anything like last night," says Menoken-area rancher Gabe Brown. His driveway is mud, thanks to more than a foot of rain that fell in his front yard. "Now it`s raining again, so I don`t know where we`ll end up, but it`s the most rain I`ve ever seen in a short period of time," Brown says. He spent most of his day out in the rain, trying to clean up the problems it caused. "The biggest damage we had was this morning we had the herd bulls were in a pasture a couple miles from home and the water took all the fences out, they were scattered over two miles so we spent most of the morning getting those herd bulls back," he says. The rain washed the fences out, fences he had just replaced after a hard winter. "It took quite awhile this spring after that winter, we had to start all over in some of those locations," he says. Brown says he`ll also lose about 125 acres of winter wheat that won`t recover after the deluge. While his story is one of the extreme ones, many other farmers were glad for the rain. "There`s some benefit from it as far as some of the pastures that needed some moisture," says ElRoy Haadem, the Burleigh County NDSU extension agent. He cautions there are a few things to watch out for. "Everything`s so lush and grown in such cool, beneficial weather, if all of the sudden it turned to 95 degrees, we`d have some tremendous problems with the crops then," Haadem says. He says disease could be a concern, depending on how much rain farmers received, but says if all goes well, they will see a nice crop this fall. Haadem says farmers who planted around standing water in their fields this spring might lose some of the crop that`s seeded there, because those potholes likely expanded and flooded out what was nearby. |
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