Tough choices for farmers

The farmer sat motionless, as if his thoughts were far, far away. Then he lifted his head and said, “Everyone is going to have to make their own choices as to what to do.”

Like perhaps no time in history, Southwestern Minnesota, along with many other parts of the state, are facing a crisis of mammoth proportions.

The time for planting crops has come — and for all intensive purposes, will be gone by the end of the week — and for the most part, there are no seeds planted into the deep, rich soil of one of the nations best growing areas.

The culprit, of course, has been one saturating rain after another — until the ground is so wet, the drying sun and warm wind so infrequent, there’s no way farmers can get into their fields.

Some fields have felt the farmer’s touch — but as one farmer put it, “It’s patchy, very spotty. It’s hard to tell what will come up.”

Others, well, they’ve planted where they could and skipped the low spots. But as they contemplate planting, looming before them is a May 31 deadline, after which they lose the potential for full crop insurance.

After that date, planting can be done, but insurance coverage drops drastically — and, of course, the growing season has already been shortened — sending a message the projected yield will be down.

“Many farmers will chose not to plant at all,” said another farmer. The picture conjured up by many is of field, upon field without corn or soybeans standing vacant in the summer sun.

That, of course, means the product produced by the farm industry will be down —storage bins of grain will likely be emptied to pay the bills and “the affect on the rural business community could be catastrophic,” said one farmer.

There are stories of fertilizer companies trying to fertilize wet fields because they already have the product and they don’t want to waste it.

That brings with it the vision of machines stuck in the wet fields and time and effort wasted trying to free those machines. It’s not a pretty picture.