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Wet Farms
Thu Sep 25, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
For the past several years, farmers in the Southeast United States have been plagued by summer
droughts; but not this year. From North Carolina, Leda Hartman describes how soggy conditions
are hurting both crops and growers.
Almost all of North Carolina has had excess rainfall this year...six to 20 inches above
normal. It was especially wet during May and June, the prime planting season for row crops
like corn, cotton and soybeans. Craig Hayes specializes in statistics at the North Carolina
Department of Agriculture. One thing he watches carefully is the soil's moisture level. If it
goes above 10 or 15 percent, it's too wet to plant. This spring was full of days like that.
Forty-four percent of the time we had surplus moisture for planting, and it was just terrible.
We just couldn't get the crops in.
Hayes says farmers can't plant in wet weather because the soil gets compacted and heavy
machinery can get stuck in the ground. Crops that start off growing well turn yellow and
basically drown; And there's a host of other ills:
The moisture also hurts the crops in that you can't apply herbicides, you know, knock down the
weeds. More pests are in the fields because of the high moisture content. It's harder to take
care of. The moisture takes the nutrients out of the ground, so the farmers put the fertilizer
in and that's when it tends to wash away. So it actually really can be very harmful if we have
too much rain.
At this stage, maybe all farmers can do is hope the situation doesn't get worse ...especially
considering hurricane season, with its potential for double-digit rainfall, will last until
November. For The Weather Notebook, I'm Leda Hartman in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The Weather Notebook is funded generously by Subaru of America, and The National Science
Foundation.
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