Soggy fields leave farmers with few good answers

Thousands of sites across US endure spring planting season like no other

Associated Press

DES MOINES, Iowa

Between the country’s trade dispute with China and the seemingly endless storms that have drenched the central U.S., Iowa farmer Robb Ewoldt has had plenty of time to think about whether it’s too late to plant this season, how much federal aid he might get if he does or whether to skip it altogether and opt for an insurance payment.

Instead of driving his tractor, he’s driving a truck these days to earn a living while wondering how long it will be before he can return to his fields.

“Sometimes I think, what the heck am I doing farming?” he said recently. “When you owe the bank money, you do some pretty crazy stuff.”

Ewoldt is one of thousands of Midwestern farmers facing such decisions as they endure a spring like no other. It started with poor corn and soybean prices falling even further as the U.S. and China imposed new tariffs, and was compounded by torrential rain and flooding that has made planting impossible and killed off crops that were starting to emerge.

Conscious that the trade dispute was devastating American farmers, President Donald Trump promised $16 billion in aid but the promise has only added to farmers’ confusion about how to approach this strange spring.

That’s because details about how much money farmers would receive won’t be released until later, to avoid influencing what crops they decide to plant. While there’s a rationale behind keeping the aid details secret, it adds another layer of uncertainty for farmers already guessing about the weather, future crop prices and how much they would get in insurance payments if they don’t plant a crop.

“It’s a take what you can get and keep moving year,” said Todd Hubbs, an agricultural economist at the University of Illinois.

In the 18 states that grow most of the nation’s corn, only 58 percent of the crop had been planted as of last week – a far cry from the 90 percent that would ordinarily be planted by that point. In states that grow nearly all of the soybeans, less than half of the normal crop had been planted. Farmers have even taken to Twitter – creating a noplant19 hashtag – to commiserate and share photos of their swamped fields.

For Jeff Jorgenson, it’s an all-consuming question of how much of his roughly 3,000 acres of southwestern Iowa land he can profitably farm. About a quarter of it can’t be farmed due to Missouri River flooding, and much of his remaining property has been inundated with rain and water from the neighboring Nishnabotna River.

Navigating muddy roads in his pickup truck this week, he tried to figure out whether it would be worth pumping water off his land or whether that would even be possible. Normally it wouldn’t be worth the effort, but with the prospect that the Midwest’s miserable weather will reduce the nation’s fall harvest, corn and soybean prices have started to rise and planting every acre possible has become more attractive than settling for insurance that would pay roughly half the revenue of a normal crop.