Farmers enjoying rain, but not this much rain

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Farmers are rejoicing in the rainfall in recent days throughout the Ozarks.

“Right now it’s been really beneficial,” Dan Bigbee, owner of Fassnight Farms said.

“Rain is really important in southwest Missouri and really many places across the Midwest,” said Nathan Isakson, a cattle producer in Dade County. “The joke is we’re always two weeks away from a drought. And so you go 14 days without rain, the soil starts to become hard, you have a lot of dust.”

However, there is a thing as too much rain.

“I’m so grateful to have what we’ve got because we were really having some plants suffer,” Bigbee said. “That being said, we have more rain predicted and the ground is saturated. It tends to run off faster, which makes our namesake, Fassnight Creek rise, get out of its banks, which can do a little damage at this stage of the farm and season. For me, being a produce farmer, basically what we need is between an inch and two inches of rain every week to ten days. Anything less (or more) is detrimental.”

“As livestock producers, we’re really grass farmers before we have our livestock produce. If we don’t have anything for them to graze and convert into a healthy, nutritious, protein-filled product, then we have nothing that we can actually do,” Isakson said. “So we’re pretty well hamstrung at that point. We don’t like erosion in agriculture.”

Isakson said saturation can prevent growth from the ground up.

“Whenever we have rain saturation of the soil, the oxygen tends to leave and that can be negative for plant growth,” Isakson. “Additionally, last spring it was very wet, and we also had a lot of cloud cover and that reduced photosynthesis action from sunlight can also be detrimental.”

Another issue is having to wait out saturated land or being unable to use treatment for your land properly.

“At 2.8 inches, I’ve had all I want for probably eight, ten days. The dilemma is when will the field dry out to resume planting,” Bigbee said. “Rain makes the weeds grow as well as the plants. So you have to have a relatively dry soil to cultivate.”

“My wife and I are struggling at home getting field work done whenever it’s raining. We can’t apply herbicides or insecticides to get rid of pests that are giving us issues,” Isakson said. “We also can’t get fertilizer applied on the ground and that can make it a challenge even for a livestock operator to establish new plant varieties that are beneficial to our livestock and allow us to produce at a more efficient level.”

Bigbee said he used to try to do things that could reduce damage from too much rain but hasn’t recently.

“It’s really hard to control four or five, six inches of rainwater, with it being the most powerful force on earth. It’s just going to go where it’s going to go.”

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