Winter is coming for county farmers
Staff writer
As temperatures drop around the county, farmers are finishing milo harvest and preparing to get wheat seeds down in time for winter.
“We’re winding down soybean harvest right now while at the same time putting in wheat, doing some tillage, doing some spraying,” Chris Mathews, manager of PrairieLand Partners in Marion, said. “We’re looking at probably being done with beans maybe at the end of the week. Wheat will be done probably in the next couple.”
After their wheat is planted, farmers will take a break from tending their fields. The wheat ideally will grow to about three inches tall before freezing until spring.
“We’ll start seeing a slowdown in the next couple of weeks,” Mathews said. “Some guys have livestock or cattle, so that keeps them busy for the winter. But if you’re strictly a row-crop guy…they typically find something on the side to do, or that’s when maintenance is done, and equipment rebuild, and that sort of thing.”
Mathews does not manage a farm himself, but as manager of a large agricultural dealership, he understands the farming cycle well.
“I think it’s really been an above-average year,” he said. “We were able to get a wheat harvest in the summer, a corn harvest in the fall, and a bean harvest here in the winter. And all three were decent returns.”
But Mathews also spoke about an agricultural economy which left some farmers unsatisfied with the prices they received for their corn and milo.
His more temporal concern is dry weather, which helps with harvesting the beans but makes it difficult for wheat to grow.
“You hope to see it grow a little before it freezes,” Mathews said. “It’ll almost look like a grass field.”
One nice thing about wheat is that its schedule is more flexible than other crops.
With soybeans, farmers try to hit tight planting windows of two to three days. Wheat is “not quite as accurate,” Mathews said. “Wheat is just sort of put in the ground, kind of dispersed.”
As long as farmers get their crop down in the next few weeks, they should be fine.