this...call it fifteen hundredths of an inch...rain from the first of june brings my back yard total since may first to 10.55"...rather a lot actually...and there is a possibility of more rain later this week which is not especially good news for industrial farming hereabouts...
admittedly there are a number of farmers around here who have begun to use "no till" methods and it would be a bit difficult to tell just yet if they had been planted...however i have been watching these particular fields for a number of years and they have always been plowed in the past...
the field behind the big box stores ( which by the way are mostly closed now...i don't get out that way too much these days ) is fallow as well...then again there have been years when it was not planted and that didn't have anything to do with rain...perhaps a less reliable barometer of planting than the more rural fields...still we will be looking in on it until we are certain it is not going to be planted...
you can clearly see where water collected and sat before it dried...
and even more clearly where it still is collected...
all that collected water had to run off form somewhere and when it did it washed down topsoil and cut through berms which is another can of worms in the fields...the agronomists at purdue university say that "late planting" accounts for only a twelve to sixteen percent drop off in harvests...one supposes there must be a consensus definition of "late" but i do not seem able to find it...the usda seems less sanguine and according to index mundi the price of a metric tonne of dense yellow #2 on may thirty-first was $33.79 higher than it was on april thirtieth..a commodity price ( along with soy beans and soybean oil ) worth watching over the summer and into harvest.
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