Kendall County’s wet spring means a poor growing season

Kurt Schobert has one word to describe this year’s growing season: “wet.” Schobert, a seed salesman who helps his father and uncle farm south of Yorkville, says there was just too much rain this spring and summer.

“The damage is definitely done and the yield is not going to be there,” he said. “We don’t know until it’s in the bin but it’s definitely going to be down.”

Schobert and other area farmers are reporting that the extremely wet spring and summer have contributed to what will be a less than ideal crop season for corn and soy bean growers.

About seven inches of rain fell in Yorkville in June, according to the National Weather Service, making it the fourth wettest June on record here. Statewide, the agency reported that Illinois’s average rainfall of 9.53 inches in June was the most on record.

Schobert said his crops have fared pretty well this year but crops on farms in the southern and eastern portion of Kendall County have been hit hard.

“There are parts of the county that are in really bad shape,” Schobert said. “The south end of county and the southeast end of the county is the worst.”

Bob Dhuse, who farms south of Yorkville, explains that the soil in those areas is generally a poorer quality than in the northern parts of the county and the land doesn’t drain as well.

“Most of my stuff looks pretty good. Most of my fields are pretty well drained and we were lucky we didn’t get real heavy rain,” Dhuse said.

Normally, he said farmers are praying for rain in July.

In fact, the southern portion of the county and northern Grundy County were also hit with more rain.

“It washed a lot of soil away, it took cornstalks and washed them away everywhere – any low spot, it drowned it out,” Dhuse said. “It depends on if you have good drainage and how bad you got hit with the rain and I was pretty lucky.”

Dan Reedy, executive director of the Kendall County Farm Bureau, said that you can sometimes see these place from the road because the crop is low or the ground is completely bare if the damage is bad enough.

“The crop’s gone and it won’t come back,” Reedy said. “In some fields there could be as much as 10 to 15 percent loss, but it’s hard to say on a total basis. What’s out there is out there.”

When a field is flooded for a long time, the roots are deprived of oxygen, Schobert adds, and that can stunt the growth of corn or beans or kill the crop all together.

“All of spring was wet and it just kept coming. It’s been kind of relentless,” Schobert said. “In the last two weeks it’s finally dried out.”

He also pointed out that flooding can lead to a lack of nitrogen in the soil, a vital chemical in fertilizer. Nitrogen will sometimes seep further below the surface where roots can’t reach it. Also, when fields get flooded Schobert said it prevents farmers from adding nitrogen during the middle of the season.

Reedy said another concern in the coming months could be dry and windy weather. If that happens, he said, the corn crop could blow down.

“If you were to go out and look at a corn field you would notice that the roots aren’t very deep simply because they didn’t have to go very deep in the soil to get the moisture,” he said. “The cornstalk itself doesn’t have a real good foundation because the roots do not go deep in the soil to hold the corn up. It’s just like a foundation on a building, the deeper the roots have to go down to get that water that’s your basis for holding it down.”

Dhuse says the soil tends to dry out quickly and last week he noticed cracks in his soil.

“It dries out quick you get these days like this – warm days and these plants suck up a lot of moisture and push it into the atmosphere,” he said. “You take a plant and hold it in your hand and you can watch it wilt.”

But what does one washed-out growing season mean to grocery prices? Schobert says despite the bad crop season he doesn’t think a bad growing season will mean an overnight spike in grocery prices. Additionally, the last few great growing seasons have lowered corn prices.

“It will have a trickle-down effect, but you’re not going to directly feel it,” he said. “Corn prices are very low right now because there is so much supply out there from previous years. Just because it’s a bad year for farmers this year – the prices are not really reflective now.”

“On top of low prices it’s a double whammy,” Schobert said.