Planting season is in jeopardy

Rained out! OK, that works in baseball because the game can be rescheduled. But when it comes to “planting season,” the constant rain is threatening to end hopes of planting crops in 2019.

After a week when farmers began to dabble in the fields, spraying, tiling, and some even planting, the heavens opened up last weekend and poured up to an inch or so more water on an already saturated farm industry. By Monday, some farmers, like one from Tracy were saying, “I doubt if we’ll even get the fields planted this year.” In Minneota, there’s guarded optimism.

A retired farmer cast reality on the planting problem. “It’s economics,” he said, indicating there are a variety of answers, some including calling on prevented planting plans by not planting at all, some partial planting and others depending on government subsidies. The options may be as varied as farmers are themselves.

Others have indicated, some will plant the high spots and leave the low spots alone because they’ll be too wet. On Friday, before the rain, one farmer’s wife proclaimed, “Hurray, we got some of the planting done!” \So all is not lost.

But every farmer talked to indicated they hadn’t seen a “saturated spring” that’s caused moving back the planting season to this late in the year. “Usually it’s no later than the second week in May,” related one farmer.

Now, with at least an inch more last weekend, and a possibility of more rain this week, the idea of “not planting at all” has begun to circulate.

A year with no crops growing in some of the richest farm land in the Midwest seems to be impossible to imagine.

But it could happen!