Rain falls too late for some crops

The rain that fell across Johnston County earlier this week came too late to save some crops.

Brandon Batten grows 300 acres of soybeans, 200 acres of corn and 150 acres of tobacco around Stricklands Crossroads south of Four Oaks. “The corn is essentially toast,” he said in an interview last week.

The pollination window for corn is brief, and rain is essential, Batten said. “What I planted on time has been … trying to pollinate for the last 10 days,” he said. “But we haven’t had any rain, and with the heat, it’s pretty much going to be a loss.”

“I’m not going to tell you we can’t find an ear out there, but it’s maybe 10% of potential at best,” Batten said.

Marshall Lee grows produce — “everything from A to Z that will grow around here” — on 150 acres in the Meadow community. He sells his harvest — cucumbers, bell peppers, squash, onions, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, hot peppers, tomatoes — at the State Farmers Market in Raleigh and at a stand in Benson.

“The heat’s hurting me more than they dry weather, but it’s all pretty bad,” Lee said last week.

“It’s just burning them up in the field,” he said of heat’s effect on plants. “Even if you got water to them, it’s still burning them up in the field in this 100-degree weather.”

Lee does get water to his vegetables thanks to 10 deep-water wells on his farm. But like Batten, he will have to write off some of what he grows.

“For me, we’re talking about pole beans, sweet corn, anything that I don’t have on black plastic,” Lee said of his losses.

Lee can grow most of his produce on plastic, which he and other growers use for weed control. And they run drip-irrigation lines under the plastic to water the vegetables.

“Which means even when it’s dry, we’re still able to give it water as long as our wells hold up,” he said.

So far, only one well has failed, Lee said. The repair was a hefty $10,000.

“A lot of my sweet corn, pole beans and that kind of stuff, it’s already history,” Lee said, adding that rain now would do those vegetables no good. “I’ve already lost what I got in it.”

“That’s the worst,” he said of the beans and corn. “Even the stuff on black plastic is suffering terrible though.”

Before the storms earlier this week, Batten said he last had appreciable rainfall on his lands weeks ago. “My rain gauge has had five-hundredths of an inch — I really wouldn’t call that appreciable — in the last 31 days,” he said.

Much of Johnston County has been equally dry, said Tim Britton, the agent who oversees field crops for the Johnston County Cooperative Extension Service. “I’d say Archer Lodge, Stancil’s Chapel, Kenly down to Princeton, it’s been about two and a half weeks,” he said. “But from Smithfield, Bentonville, Four Oaks, Newton Grove area, it’s been over a month. And for the Four Oaks ZIP code, it’s been six weeks.”

Corn growers like Batten area suffering most, Britton said. “We’re going to be bush-hogging a lot of corn under in the next two weeks,” he said. “As soon as the insurance companies say do it, it’s going to be done.”

Johnston growers plant corn on some 8,000 to 10,000 acres each year, Britton said. “It ends up in feed mills,” he said. “A hundred percent of the corn we grow goes into our feed for poultry, cattle and pigs.”

Growers will deliver little to the feed mills this year, Britton said. “Eighty percent of the acreage is probably gone now,” he said.

“My heart just goes out to these guys,” Britton said. “We started off pretty good,” he said of the crop year, “and then everything just went south.”

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