Farmers reflect on a hard growing season

UNION COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – It’s been a long and unpredictable growing season for farmers.

You may remember it was a cold and wet start for planting, and because of that late start farmers were left scrambling to find the right crop the plant and harvest in time.

All that considered, it seems farmers will be alright this year.

Wet, dry, cold, and hot, farmers didn’t catching a break this growing season.

“It’s a typical Mississippi summer,” said long-time Union County farmer, Mike Pannell.

The start of the spring left the worst planting conditions, and farmers had to act quickly.

“Once the farmers were able to get to the field, we planted a lot of acres really fast,” said Regional Ag Specialist for the MSU Extension, Bill Burdine. “The first planting that we got in have done really well overall.”

But corn farmers had to make a switch.

“We did lose some of our corn acreage and ended up going into soybeans,” Burdine said. “Some of it switched to cotton, but the corn was the biggest thing we lost early on from the cold and rain.”

“We didn’t plant any corn,” Pannell said. “We swapped everything to beans. It was too wet and too cold to get corn planted on time.”

Now, farmers are dealing with a drought and have to hope and pray water comes soon for the plants that were planted late.

“Most of the Northeast Mississippi area is under a mild or moderate drought conditions, some areas have picked up some timely rains, but many areas are not,” said Burdine. “So we have lost some yield here on the last part of the season.”

After talking with Burdine and Pannell, everything seems to be going just fine, considering the setbacks.

“I think cotton is going to do pretty well,” Burdine said. “It’s going to be at least average. Soybeans will probably be average, slightly below. The thing I’m mostly worried about would be some of our corn acres. They just didn’t get off to a very good start.”

“It’s going to be pretty good. I mean, some of the beans have got a long way to go,” said Pannell. “They were late planted, so it’s going to be along, stretched out harvest. We’ll take what we can get.”

Like they said, it’ll be a more stretched-out harvest season than normal.

Plus, we know Mississippi’s weather is erratic and unpredictable.

Maybe Mother Nature will cut these farmers a break at the end of the season.