rain

I woke last night at four o'clock to the sound of rain on the roof.  I cannot sleep while it rains.  This has been going on for some time, since the early nineties, I think.  That is when rain started seriously interfering with my farming plans. I had started a project of ridge til then and pretty immediately became aware that it was not a good fit for my poorly drained and low lying soils.  Ridge til lasted perhaps five years for me.

Looking back at my forty plus years of farming I now see that I was only successful at any kind of small grain in two of them, both years immediately following drought years:  1977, my first year, and then again in 1989.  These two years, and these years only, I was able to be early enough with seeding and was rewarded with a respectable crop.

One way of understanding my farming years would be to call it an ongoing search for a crop rotation that could be built around corn, the only crop generally successful here.  After a few moves at peas and one or two years of fall seeded grains, soybeans were given the boost out of the rotation-they never grew well on this farm-and we began to take a serious look at fall seeded small grains again.

But the most success has come with a major move toward forage and grazing. Forty per cent of our crop acreage in any given year is in hay. Often the need to bring stock off the pastures in late summer benefited the crop rotation. The cattle could take a cover crop mix by grazing, thus resting the pastures. The trouble is that for the last three years, and it looks to continue this year, this practice is not available either.  The cattle have waded around in mud tromping down most of what they should have eaten.  This year we have them on oats that were seeded on prevented planting acres and they have the entire sward covered in mud, shortening the feed supply by perhaps a week.

The rain that woke me up last night was an inch and three tenths.  This followed two and a half inches four days earlier and three quarters of an inch twice in the week before that.  And as usual, we didn't get the worst of it.  I don't know where the cattle should go when we have to pull them off. They will be destructive wherever.  Rain chance tonight 70%.  One more ruined night's sleep.

And the urban people, our customers, think the rain problem is only serious if it ruins the weekend.  Few know how close we are to a serious food issue.