Northland farmers facing flood challenges

Marvin Pearson is having a tough time making hay and planting crops at his family farm near Cook.

“We've had two floods,” Pearson said. “It's flooded up into an area where we store hay bales and it's put a coat of scum on about 70 or 80 acres of fields where the cows won't even eat it.”

Northeastern Minnesota flooding has taken a heavy toll on businesses, homes, communities, and roads.

But Pearson is part of another segment that's also facing a battle.

Area farmers.

“I spoke with some farmers up north on the phone this morning,” Troy Salzer, a University of Minnesota Extension Service educator in St. Louis County said. “One of the big things is there's hardly been any hay made so far.”

Torrential rains have saturated area farm fields, Salzer said.

That's made the fields too soft for farmers to effectively operate tractors and hay making equipment, he said.

Soft fields can lead to equipment getting stuck.

That, said Salzer, has happened locally.

“One of our farmers has a blue tractor,” Salzer said without naming the brand. “And he was pulling a red discbine behind it with white on it. He said it looked like a patriotic bobber out there in the long grass as he worked to get it out of the field.”

Pearson said his family is having difficulty trying to make hay.

The family has about 300 head of dairy and beef cattle.

“We've been trying to make hay for three weeks,” Pearson said. “We've only cut 200 acres and we have 900 acres more to go. The fields got too soft to make hay on, so we've been trying to chop it for silage.”

The massive amounts of rain and delays in being able to make hay also means the quality of the hay crop is likely to suffer, Salzer said.

“It's going to lead to less quality overall,” Salzer said. “Basically, what it comes down to is there's no demand for hay because there's so much grass. The market value is not there.”

Some farmers have also experienced the devastating loss of livestock due to flooding, Salzer said.

“We've had a few people up here where cattle have washed out under a bridge as they try to get back together,” Salzer said. “The cattle get pushed to higher ground and the only place to go was in a culvert and they got sucked into the culvert.”

A farmer in the Cook area says he lost seven cattle due to the flooding, Salzer said.

Another farmer near Faribault south of the Twin Cities figures he lost three or four calves, Salzer said.

Crop planting has also taken a hit.

“A lot of crops haven't been planted yet,” Salzer said. “People who rely on grains haven't been able to plant.”

“The crop farming this year is ridiculous,” Pearson said. “We had dug up 45 acres and were ready to plant. My son got the drill ready, then we got three or four inches of rain. It's put the kibosh on being able to plant grain.”

Demographics in northeastern Minnesota are also impacting hay and cattle production, Salzer said.

With several years of drought, some farmers thinned out their herd as hay became sparse and expensive.

But now, the weather and hay crop has changed, he said.

With ample hay growth, hay prices will fall, Salzer said.

“With our demographics (aging), people are counting on hay as their income as they've gotten out of livestock,” Salzer said. “I can't blame them for wanting to get out of cattle, but we've had three years of dry weather, two years of drought and now we're kind of back to normal.”

As always, farmers face challenges, Salzer said.

Increases in fuel, equipment and supply costs have hit farmers hard.

Drought in recent years brought even more challenges.

However, this year's spring and early summer rain has produced even more hurdles, he said.

Although weather conditions often differ from one side of the Laurentian Divide to the other and also near Lake Superior, that hasn't happened this year, Salzer said.

Instead, it's been wet across the entire state he said.

“There's nothing easy about farming,” Salzer said. “And then something like this comes along and you don't expect it.”

For Pearson and other area farmers, it's another year of trying to survive.

Pearson hopes that if the weather eventually drys out, his family will at least be able to get a decent second crop of hay.

On top of problems in his fields, sewage backed up into the family's basement due to the rainfall for the first time ever, Pearson said.

“If we make it through this year, it can't get any worse unless someone dies,” Pearson said.