Farmers making best of drought conditions
By Suzanne Werre
Editor
It’s well known that much of North Dakota is in the midst of a drought – a bad enough drought that a lot of corn may not be the proverbial “knee-high by the 4th of July.”
But some of it will be, and already is, beyond knee-high, which is saying quite a bit when the farmer that’s standing in the corn field is well over 6-feet tall.
Then again, some of it won’t get very tall at all.
That’s one of the things about this year’s crops. The rain has been spotty, so where there’s been timely rain, the crops look pretty decent. Where the rain was slim to nothing, that’s what the crops tend to look like – slim to nothing.
Paul Anderson, the 6-foot farmer who farms between Underwood and Coleharbor, says that right now his corn crop is looking pretty decent, particularly where his fields got decent amounts of rain at the right time.
He also looked at what he was dealing with for moisture this spring, so he put off planting corn until a little later than usual, starting May 7 and finishing up on the 25th.
