Weather has crops on the verge of ruin

By JANE W. GRAHAM
and CARYL VELISEK
AFP Correspondents

What started out as a near-ideal growing season this spring is on the verge of disaster as drought conditions and extreme temperartues eat away at crop yields across the Mid-Atlantic region.
Early-planted corn is in the most dire need of rain, Extension agents report, as much of it has reached the critical tasseling stage for pollination.
But other crops are far from safe.
Double crop beans are struggling to germinate or survive after breaking the soil. Many vegetables, even with irrigation, can’t keep up amid temperatures over 100 degrees F, or have matured earlier than normal. The heat has affected livestock production as well.
“It’s not pretty,” Wade Thomason, Virginia Tech’s Extension corn and small grains specialist said last week. “Central Virginia is in really bad shape. Corn is not doing anything and small soybean plants are dying.”
Thomason reported that even the people with the capability to irrigate got behind when the heat wave descended on the state, pulling the moisture out of the soil.
Thomason said the areas north and south of Richmond are as bad as anywhere in the state.  Areas closer to the coast are doing a little better but no one is good, he said, except the people with irrigation.  Corn in that area has formed ears.
“The past 10 days have seen a dramatic decline in crop conditions,” Tom Stanley, an Augusta County Extension agent, said on July 6. “I’m pretty sure we will see a significant difference in early planted (pre-May 1) and late planted (post-May 20) corn with the late planted suffering the most.”
In Culpeper County, Extension agent Carl Stafford said growers started out with tremedous potential with timely planting, good weed contol and advanced hybrids, “but corn is trying to pollinate and beans are blooming during weather conditions that threaten the success of these two critical stages.”
“The early planted corn is our greatest risk now due to the likely failure of pollination. We will not recover this loss,” Stafford said. “Beans, however, can abort blooms and try again later if rains come.”
Discussions are under way to evaluate crop, pasture, hay and livestock water conditions as it relates to disaster status for the region.  
On Virginia’s Eastern Shore, Northampton County ag agent William Shockley Jr. said he is surveying his farmers for crop conditions to support “a possible crop disaster designation for the county” due to  “serious damage to the corn crop.”
To the southwest, basically beyond Interstate 77’s north-south corridor conditions are said to be better.   
Across Maryland and Delaware, the story doesn’t change.
In Delaware, Cory Whaley, Sussex County ag agent described the area’s corn crop as “in really bad shape. ... “It’s burning up from the bottom,” he said, “and curled up at the top.”
Whaley’s records showed that the last rain in Georgetown was on June 28. The gauge there recorded one-third of an inch.
In a band of storms which moved over Delaware on June 22 and 23, Whaley said, some areas got one to two inches, but it was very scattered.
“And before that,” he noted, “it was already incredibly dry.”
In Frederick County, Md., Extension crops agent Terry Poole, said the situation for farmers in the county is approaching “tragic.”
“I’ve seen some corn waist high and tasseling. It’s terrible,” Poole said. “And if we don’t get relief, we have to worry about soybean mites and toxins in sorghum also.”
In Talbot County, ag agent Shannon Dill reported even the heavier soils have dried. “Corn is at the tassel stage which is a critical time for moisture. Losses on early corn will occur,” Dill said.
In Dorchester County, ag agent Sudeep Mathew said without heavy rains coming soon, farmers could see their dryland corn yields cut in half, and that’s even a “hopeful estimate,” he said.
“Many fields that I have walked seemed like concrete. If anyone had dryland corn on sandy soils, they were the ones that hurt most. In general I could say that the 90 percent of the dryland corn is seriously affected,” Mathew said.
Brian Butler, the ag agent in Carroll County, said it’s really bad in the western and northern parts of his county where red soils are predominant.
“We went into this growing season at least two weeks ahead with the momentum we got from all that snow and the early rains, he said. “But that is getting lost in this excessive heat and dryness and cows are stressing because of it too.”
Jeff Semler, Washington County ag agent, said farmers are getting a “double whammy” with the record heat and no rain.
“We’re not ready to call corn and beans a loss, but we’re getting close if we don’t get some relief soon,” he said.
St. Mary’s County in Maryland, has had no significant rain in the past four and a half weeks except for some very isolated showers in southern areas of the county, according to Extension agent Ben Beale.
“The corn crop has suffered the worse with much of the crop being a total loss. Later planted corn was holding on, but many of these fields are now firing up, pushing tassels and plants dying in the field,” Beale wrote in a crop update to farmers last week. “Double crop soybeans have not received sufficient rain to germinate and grow. Most double crop fields are small with plants less than 4 inches tall. Many later fields never germinated, or have germinated and died.”
Beale added that some farmers with livestock are considering chopping corn for silage but reminds them that nitrate poisoning becomes a serious concern in this situation.
Augusta County’s Stanley said one factor in the drought damage is the expanding window for planting. “Forty years ago, I would say 95 percent of all the Valley region’s corn was planted between May 1 and May 15.  Now we see corn planted anywhere from April 10 (or earlier some years) to June 5 (after soft-dough barley forage harvest).”