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Nebraska farmer says recent rain might have saved his dryland corn
East Central Nebraska farmer Mitch Oswald says he’s been eagerly waiting for Mother Nature to bring relief to the drier-than-normal growing conditions. “We got anywhere from .80 to an inch on everything,” he says. “It’s our first rain since – oh gosh, I don’t know when – probably in over a month I bet.”
The corn and soybean grower from Aurora tells Brownfield his crops were struggling until last night. “You can definitely tell the dryland areas we were probably three or four days away from dryland from being completely toast. So, this rain is going to save that for another couple of weeks.”
Oswald says his biggest concern for the rest of the growing season is, “If we have a spell like we just did again with this heat, when you have guys pumping water like crazy it’s easy to get behind. I’ve got a couple of pivots, if I didn’t get this inch of rain, I probably was going to be running 7 days-a-week for the next couple of weeks to catch back up.”
Oswald says his fields missed pockets of severe weather that brough large hail and damaging winds near the Columbus area where many fields were totaled.
