Rains complicate farmers' plans

Many Arkansas farmers have missed the best time to plant because of persistent rains, and more precipitation is in the forecast.
Craighead County Extension Service agent Eric Grant said that the end of May is considered the end of the optimum planting period for the region. Many fields are still too wet for planting equipment to get in.
The National Weather Service said Tuesday that records indicated that 12.89 inches of rain have fallen so far at the Little Rock airport, making it the wettest May since 1893, with the record coming the year before when 15.91 inches of rain fell. If another 0.36 inches of rain falls at Little Rock, May 2009 will become the second wettest on record.
The rainfall has put growers in the Mississippi Delta well behind where they want to be in planting soybeans, cotton, corn and rice.
Scott Monfort, Extension soybean specialist, told The Jonesboro Sun that an unanswered question is whether the rain and late planting will provide fertile conditions for Asian soybean rust to spread.
The rust isn't a problem if it arrives late in the season but can devastate a crop if it spreads before the beans are mature.
Craighead County farmers Cleo Watkins Jr. and Joe Christian said they won't be able to plant as much as they intended because the Cache River and flooding from heavy rainfall have been keeping a lot of his ground wet.
"We'll just have to idle that ground," Watkins told the Sun, meaning he'll get no income from that land.
"I've never seen it like this," Watkins said. He has experienced a lot of water during his farming career because a lot of the ground he tills is along the Cache River, which floods nearly annually at some point.
"But when it quits, it will quit, and we will be begging for rain," he said.
Christian said he had just finished planting 200 acres of soybeans when 4½ inches of rain fell on his farm near the Cache on Sunday. The water didn't start to recede until Tuesday.
But beans can't stand water, and Christian said he is worried about whether they will come up.
"I'll just have to wait and see," he said. He has some rice that has been under water for three days and hopes it is not damaged too much.
Monfort said in a recent report that acreage that had been intended for corn and some cotton acreage may have to be planted with soybeans if the rain keeps falling.
"With the waterlogged conditions, I have had several calls about replanting fields that have been under water for an extended period of time. Many of these fields will only need spot planting on the lower portions of the fields. However, where plant populations are below optimum for the entire field, destroying the first planting and replanting the entire field will probably be required."
He said beans can still go in, if the rain stops and the fields dry. Monfort and others have warned growers that scouting for insect and disease problems later in the season will be very important.
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Information from: The Jonesboro Sun, http://www.jonesborosun.com