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we got 1.5 last night and couple previous nights we had small showers. right now it is raining like crazy, would guess by nightfall we will have 2.0 or better. only thing that has kept our crops alive seemed to be the heavy dew in the mornings. we have been pumping water out of the creek for our garden, good thing we did or it would of been dead. didnt want to worry about stretching our well dry we have a shallow well.
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38 & 41 B, sickle mower, 2 way plows, rear field cultivator, 2 row drill planter
40 Combine
66 Combine
Roto Baler
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We're just happy that it cooled down over the last week... finally down to 85 during the day, and cool enough at night to get dew. Clear skies day and night make for high transpiration rates. Soil moisture levels are very low, to very deep points. Rain that we HAVE gotten, did not penetrate appreciably- every rain of any measure was followed by clear skies and sun, so it just pulled the moisture right back aloft, leaving us no better. Corn here shows it... ears are practically unpopulated.
I think the thing that will hurt the most, is the artificial demand caused by the ethanol-fuel mandates... they'll drive the price of grain so high that livestock feed for the winter will simply not be within economic reach. Add that to very low hay production, and you have a recipe for livestock market disaster. If I had livestock, I'd be selling off virtually all of it, because the food supply through winter will be essentially nothing. Furthermore, with our soil moisture progression from surface to typical frost depth being low, the ground will freeze really deep, really fast... the underground pipes are at terrible risk when this happens, and what makes it worse, is that any snow that melts, soaks in just far enough to freeze into a 'crust', preventing soil below from gathering moisture from above. Best we can hope for to combat crusting is a very, very gradual autumn, with lots of light rain, and very warm snowfall through at least January.
This kind of weather should not come as a surprise to anyone- we're at the peak of the solar cycle, there've been a steady procession of major solar events (coronal mass ejections, solar flares, etc) that have basted us pretty good... when it drives up temperatures, we get these 'bubbles'. Solar Cycle 17 hit us hard in '37 and '38... the aptly-named 'dust-bowl', and I'm pretty confident that if we were doing mechanical tilling in same quantities as then, we'd have a similar mess. Don't worry, though- the world's not coming to an end. In another year and a half, the sunspot cycle will pass, and things will feel a bit more normal.
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