Wet Weather Delays Harvest From Midwest to South

Hartwell Huddleston returned the extra combine he bought to help harvest what looked to be one of his best soybean crops ever.

Kenny Spetman, right, and Terry Hoy watch soybeans unload from a grain hauler at the Heartland Co-op, Wednesday, Nov. 4, 2009, in Booneville, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

(AP)

After two months with little letup in rain, he figures he got five days' of work out of it, and one was spent just looking for dry ground to cut. And the quality of some of the crop he did bring in from his northwest Mississippi fields was so rough, an elevator refused truckloads.

"We've had a lot of rainy years, but this one puts those to shame," said Huddleston, who also sells crop insurance. "If a person's a farmer you start to think, 'Where am I going to sleep? How am I going to feed my children?'"

Late-season rains have delayed harvest from the Great Plains to the Deep South, frustrating farmers and raising questions about whether some in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf region would be able to stay in business after disastrous back-to-back years.

The longer the remaining U.S. cotton, corn and soybean crops stay out, the greater the potential for consumers to feel the effects and face slightly higher prices for products ranging from sodas to tofu to meat, said Chad Hart, an extension economist at Iowa State University.

One saving grace for Midwest grain farmers is their corn and soybeans were in relatively good shape heading into the recent rainy spell, and expectations remained high for a still-large production year. Farmers were taking advantage of this week's break in weather to try to make up for lost time.

For many in Louisiana and Mississippi, though, the waiting continued. In some cases, it was just too late.

Stephen Logan was weighing whether to tear up his water-logged fields to get at a cotton crop speckled in places with mold, mildew and stains. He said he got 28.1 inches of rain on his northwest Louisiana farm last month, more than he said he's seen in some entire years, and the shorter days have meant less sunlight to dry things out.

"This was shaping up to be one of the best cotton crops we ever had, but it's absolutely rotted away on the stalk," Logan said. "It's very frustrating and humbling, to say the least."