CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) -- Ed Mies would like
to
plant corn on his central Illinois farm right about now, but instead he
finds himself with time to talk about how wet his fields are.
"We're
not quite waxing tractors yet," he joked Wednesday. But Mies would like
to be done by Monday and he hasn't started planting yet.
Farmers
across a wide stretch of the Midwest find themselves in similar shape,
talking, watching and waiting rather than planting, thanks to a cool,
wet spring.
"We're all sitting on pins and
needles waiting for it to dry out," said Bob Nielsen, a Purdue
University agronomy professor. Most of Indiana's fields are too wet to
plant, he said Thursday.
It reminds some of
last year, when the crop went in a month or more late in many states
and prices - just as ethanol and booming economies overseas drove up
demand - went through the roof.
Farmers rode
a yo-yo that had them waiting, then planting late, then replanting in
many cases as fields flooded, and finally watching and waiting again to
see if they could harvest crops seeded as late as June before the first
frost.
Some farmers left crops in the field,
unharvested before snow came to the northern half of the Corn Belt.
It's a memory they'd just as soon not
relive.
"We're concerned with this now," said Blair
Herbert, a 49-year-old farmer from San Jose, about 40 miles north of
Springfield.
He
still has work to do from last fall, when the combination of the late
crop and wet weather kept him from working over his fields the way he
normally would after harvest, much less his pre-planting work for this
spring and the planting itself.
"Things are stacking up on us pretty hard
now," he said as he thought about the 500-plus acres he plans to plant
with corn.
Experts say, though, that the Corn Belt is
a long way from a repeat of 2008.
Yes,
the crop is likely going to go in late from eastern Iowa to Ohio, a
region the U.S. Department of Agriculture says will account for more
than a quarter of this year's anticipated 85 million-acre corn crop.
Late crops risk missing out on crucial days
in the field that can increase production.
Accuweather
farm forecaster Dale Mohler says a slow-moving storm should douse
farmers from eastern Missouri to Ohio this weekend and into early next
week, but then the region should get at least a handful of warm, dry
days.
If that happens, the region's corn crop
could still get off to a strong start, even with a delay of a couple of
weeks, Purdue's Nielsen said.
"We could label (the wait) more as a
nuisance and frustration rather than anything serious," he said.
And
things worked out OK even last year - corn planted in late May and into
June in many places turned out fairly well. Plus, prices were high
enough that farmers had the kind of revenue cushion that made even a
decent yielding crop pay off.
Farmers know all of that.
But
prices aren't nearly as high now - just below $4 a bushel, down sharply
from last year's highs well over $7, pushed down by worldwide economic
doldrums and drastically reduced demand for ethanol.
Some
farmers say they're worried prices will drop further, in spite of the
fear of late planting, something that would typically push prices
higher.
Ted Mies, 34, who farms near his
father in Loami, about 10 miles southwest of Springfield, said it's
tempting to push into the fields too fast, something that could compact
soils and make them too dense for roots to penetrate. He won't rush in.
"Patience is the name of the game right
now," he said.
University
of Illinois crop expert Emerson Nafziger said he won't be really
concerned about unplanted corn until the second week of May, but he
admits this year, as far as weather, looks eerily like last. And he
understands farmers' nervousness.
"People start to look at the calendar and
look at the field," he said, "and (then) tinker with their planter one
more time."
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