ANTIGO — According to the Wisconsin State Climatology Office, this June was the sixth-wettest in state history, a situation that hampered planting at many farms in the county.
According to Scott Reuss, the regional crops and soils educator with the University of Wisconsin Extension Program that works routinely with local farmers, the higher than average rainfall during the past months “created some distinct field losses” in the county.
“There were some fields where we have drainage spots in fields and things like that where the crops were killed by excess water. Thankfully, we didn’t have lots of those acres like they did further south in the corn belt in Iowa and some of the areas down in that direction where they had extremely significant losses,” Reuss said. “But nonetheless, we did see a few acres of already planted crops that got drowned out. I’m not going to say I have a firm estimate on how many acres got drowned, but I’m sure it was, at minimum, triple digits with the total number of acres that were killed.”
Chad Fleishman, the owner of Fleishman Family Farms on the southwestern side of the county, said that to his knowledge, this spring has represented a historically large loss for many area crop farmers.
“Potato-wise, I’d say we lost 10 percent of the crop due to the heavy rains. Right around Antigo, that’s about the amount that I’m hearing a lot of potato farmers lost,” Fleishman said. “I’ve been going by myself since 2001, so it would be more than 20 years now, and I would say it’s been the wettest spring I can remember.”
One manager of a seed potato farm on the outskirts of the city who requested his name be omitted from the article said that while they lost roughly 10 acres to drowned fields, he actually did not consider this planting season an inordinately poor one, though he did acknowledge it presented challenges.
“It put us about two weeks behind, just because it was too wet for equipment,” he said. “When you get these heavy pounding rains, you get leaching and lose fertilizer. It gets so wet that it’s hard to spread fertilizer, hard to spray, hard to do a lot of things.”
Reuss said fields in Langlade County still fared better than those in the surrounding region.
“We were drastically dry in March and April, and in May, we kind of had more of a normal month, but most stuff was able to get planted on time, and that was not the case in the entire region in which I work. I work in four counties, and in southern Oconto, eastern Shawano, and parts of Marinette county, there’s a lot of plant acres that just couldn’t get planted because it was too wet,” Reuss said.
Langlade County Land Conservationist Chris Arrowood said the excessive rain has encumbered local crop growth for another, subtler reason: its propensity to wash away nitrogen, the nutrient in manure or fertilizer, from fields.
“Nitrogen is very water-mobile. It binds to the water and goes with it wherever the water goes. All this water is washing away the nitrates, and it’s not able to be taken up by the crops because it infiltrates down into the ground where the roots can’t get it anymore because it’s moving too fast or it ends up running off in some cases, or ending up in surface waters, where we don’t want it to be,” said Arrowood, who went on to explain that this waste of nutrients, combined with increased prices for manure and fertilizer that farmers would need to buy more of, will likely hurt farmers’ pocketbooks as well.
Reuss said that in addition to nitrogen winding up in groundwater, a future issue could be that if the humidity and moisture trends continue throughout July, crops would also face “significant disease pressure.”
“In potatoes, the one that is on everybody’s minds right now is one called early blight. It’s a fungal disease that is spread very easily in warm, humid, especially rainy weather and can cause pretty significant foliage loss. It’s also the worst disease of tomatoes and potatoes in the home garden as well,” Reuss said. “On the corn side of life, we have a disease called tar spot that has already been found in Wisconsin, and that normally doesn’t show up until later in the season. We don’t have it up in this part of the state yet, but we’re set up for more opportunities for diseases like that that we are then going to have to add to our production costs by adding a fungicide application, or we’re going to get some yield or quality decreases because of the impact of the disease.”
Arrowood said the wet fields have forced some farmers he has spoken with to salvage certain fields by planting different crops than they had intended or to simply leave them fallow for the year.
“We absolutely see [soaked fields] in the potato farms because you don’t get as good of infiltration of the water when you have tillage, because you disturb that natural structure that’s in the soil that allows the water to infiltrate down well. That’s one of the big advantages of going to a no-till system or something like that,” Arrowood said. “But I think it hits everyone, even when it comes to your alfalfa or your hay farming or something like that. With all of this rain, the first crop really didn’t come off when it needed to come off. So the disadvantage there is, if the grass over-ripens, the protein content, which is important — that’s essentially the quality of the feed — starts to go down. When you’re having to put off your harvest when you’d like to do it in mid-June or so and you’re having to put it off until July, you’re really past peak, and there will be a lot of volume there, but it won’t be the quality feed that some people need or are looking for.”
Reuss called the unpredictably wet season one of the ironic “joys of farming.”
“We’ve had a lot of stress,” he said. “It was not the worst planting season that we’ve experienced in this region — that would have been 2019 — but this was definitely up there in the top handful of worst planting seasons for many parts of the state of Wisconsin in reality. We’ve got prevented plant acres across the entire state that back in March and April nobody would have guessed that we’d have, because we actually had farms wondering the other direction and saying, ‘It’s so dry — does it even pay for me to even plant?’ I was getting questions like that as late as the middle of April, and that’s how fast it turned around.”
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