The following is the story that went with the corn picture below. As clueless as I felt with them, I really enjoyed interviewing the brothers. I know nothing about farms – why do they feel like a home I was separated from at birth? Is it that farming is really in my blood? (Doing genealogy work, it's been very rare that a grandparent wasn't a farmer. They lived in the midwest – go figure.)

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The summer of 2006 has brought on the worst growing conditions Denny and Lyle H have ever seen: weeks without rain enough to even settle the dust, the stretches of 100-degree heat…

But the brothers, who grow corn, soybeans and alfalfa on their farm south of I*, are trying to keep in mind that things could be much, much worse.

“This is where my grandpa lived and my dad lived, and Lyle just lives a mile down,” Denny explained. “Everybody talks about 1936, and Dad talks about 1955 and how bad 1955 was. But these hybrids and seed genetics in both corn and beans have come so far. Like in ’55 or ’36, if we had (their) same genetics (now), yeah, we probably wouldn’t have anything either.”

And the H's are far from having nothing. Their 1,200 acres of fields – about half corn and half beans – look full and relatively lush to passersby after recent rains.

“These last rains, you can see that the beans have shot up a little bit more, a few more pods, a little more growth spurt on them,” said Denny. “Corn, the ears are pretty well set. The stuff we have looked at, seems everything’s pollinated pretty well – the ears seem to be a pretty decent size. What the whole field’s going to be like, we don’t know.”

Recent rains will give the corn a chance to fill its kernels and take on greater kernel density, all helping the test weight at the end of the line. The brothers normally begin harvesting corn the second or third week in October and beans at the end of September, though drought conditions could push that up a week to 10 days.

“I believe that the beans, if the weather stays reasonable like this, the beans could get near to an average crop yet. I think the corn will be somewhat below average, but it’s hard to tell how much,” Denny said.

Their 40 acres of alfalfa produced two good cuttings earlier in the season. No rain fell between the second cutting and the third, which the H's said was down quite a ways. They’re hoping the improved August conditions will mean better things for the fourth cut.

“We were in real good shape through May, probably got a little bit dry the first part of June, and then June 15 we had a real nice rain and we were sitting good again then,” Lyle explained. “But from June 15 to the end of July, we probably had maybe a half-inch of rain in three different shots. Never really soaked anything up – it doesn’t get down to the roots or anything.”
They’re thankful at least that the dry spell didn’t begin any earlier than it did. If June had been as dry as July was, they guessed, the plants’ growth may have suffered even more seriously – corn may not have thrown a tassel, pollinated or thrown an ear even.

“If we keep weather like we have in August, we’ll make everything we can out of the corn at least, from what we had to work with,” Lyle predicted.

What they’ve had to work with is a hodgepodge of quality from plant to plant. Denny showed two ears of corn pulled from side-by-side stalks – one that had pollinated well and had kernels all the way out to the end, and another that either hadn’t pollinated or had aborted soon afterwards, leaving almost a dozen rows without their plump yellow kernels.

A crop of the full ears – about 16 rows around and 38 kernels long – could yield them about 175 bushels. Fields full of the poorer ears could easily cut that by 20 to 40 bushels, they said. Which type they’ll find more of in the end remains to be seen, though they have noticed that crops planted earlier – which had more time to put down roots – are doing better.

“I think this year when you start going to the elevators you’re going to find there’s going to be stories all over the board,” said Denny. “If you happened to catch a rain, or it didn’t get as hot, or soil conditions – it’s all going to be varied.

“And it varies from here to H*,” he continued. “We talked to someone over in H* (last Wednesday) that says there’s places where they’ve got ears that didn’t pollinate north and east of H* there.”

You don’t have to drive too far west into South Dakota to find conditions even worse, they said, and you don’t need to go too far south, either. Strong winds accompanying the needed rain near C* and A* left many cornfields flattened. Sandier soils are seeing more trouble, as are fields planted later.

The H's have found their own brown patches, too, especially in the lighter soils.

“Some days you think the world’s going to end, and the next day you realize that you can’t do anything about it anyhow,” Lyle said.

“If you keep yourself busy, you don’t think about it so much. Like Lyle says, there’s nothing you can do about it, so you’ve got to kind of realize you’re in the business of that, and you’re fully dependent on the weather all the time,” Denny added. “So hopefully the Good Lord will provide, and, you know, away you go.” ---