Dry crops possible in months ahead

Drought conditions may lie ahead this summer, but Creston farmer Connor Travis said the area has experienced a healthy amount of rain recently.

“But I was talking to a guy up in Ames who was saying that it’s getting pretty dry and corn is rolling,” Travis said. “When corn rolls that means it’s in a stress mode. It’s trying to preserve all of its tissue and leaf matter against the sun.”

Travis said the spring started out dry which caused problems with corn emergence, but overall it’s been a good year so far and he hopes to see more rain.

“Compared to last year, I’d say we’re sitting pretty good,” Travis said. “We saw a little bit of beans sitting in dry dirt that came up slow, but they came out of the ground. We got a little bit of rain and everything seemed to turn a corner. But corn’s really taken off.”

Travis said he planted 300 acres of corn and 200 acres of beans by April 30 on the farms he runs.

“Usually around August we do get rain going into early fall,” he said. “But throughout the summer it’s crucial to get rain at times when the corn’s gonna use it best. It’s kind of hard to say when that is but we’re never going to make it rain or complain, unless it’s something like the derecho last year.”

He said he waits at least a month, sometimes more to spray for weeds to let the corn get ahead of the weeds.

“We haven’t even started [spraying] spring beans yet. We’d like to get them to the point where they start to canopy, which means they start to cover the dirt with the leaves,” Travis said. “So we’d like to get the beans support where they’re getting close to canopy and we’ll spray them off. Then it’ll guard the soil from sunlight and prevent weeds from getting sunlight photosynthesis.”

Tony Hoskins, Grain Origination Manager at the United Farmers Cooperative in Creston, also said dry conditions are a concern. He said they recorded one quarter inch of rainfall in Afton on Friday.

“But it’s not going to do anything to alleviate the current dryness that we have,” Hoskins said. “So we’re not out of the woods.”

He said the rain did have a slight impact on the latest price shift, but that it was an ancillary factor in the latest shift.

“What has had a bigger effect on the price is that the Biden Administration is talking about easing the requirements for oil refineries regarding the wrench certificates,” Hoskins said. “In other words, he’s going to let them off the hook as far as how much ethanol and biofuels they have to play.”

He said the easing of those requirements is just a rumor, but that much like the stock market, rumors from the White House can spur drastic shifts in the agricultural commodities market. The EPA under the Trump Administration issued “hardship waivers” to small refiners who were financially strained by renewable fuel quotas. President Biden initially retracted that policy, but is now apparently reconsidering it amid pressure from labor unions and Senators.