Nebraska farmers are celebrating a near-drought rain

news

Nebraska farmers are celebrating a near-drought rain

Mother Nature has brought widespread drought relief to some farmers in the Western Corn Belt.

“I’m not going to complain one bit about the planters who are sitting here waiting for a sunny day to come back into the field.”

South Zenbraska farmer Randy Watchmaker tells Brownfield he’s been getting about three inches of rain lately. “It gives us a bit of a boost to our subsurface moisture now. That’s about what it took us to get past knee height on these crops. I said that if we hadn’t gotten rain and we had the same weather patterns we were in, the dryland crops wouldn’t have made it to our knees.”

August Fishell says he started watering before planting began. “Which I’ve never done, and we’ve cast quite a bit. We made two circles with quite a few pivots where we could.”

But he says, “We’ve got about 2.60 inches between the last two rains. We’re still in the drought. It will take a while to get out of this. The topsoil should be much better than before. We are happy about it, but we have a lot of catching up to do.”

Watchmaker grows corn and soybeans near Hastings and Fishell farmers near Axtell.