Drought of 2012

The Drought of 2012 has already gone down in history and we're only to the first of August.  Its being reported that it has surpassed the years of 1988 and 1983 and is now vying with the mid '30s for the title of worst drought in US history.  Here are a few pictures and explanations on how this drought is directly affecting our family life and farming operation:

About the crops:

This picture shows a couple of different things: 1) see how much brown there is?  The corn should still be completely green with no brown to be seen (unless its dead weeds!).  On a normal year, corn wouldn't have this much brown in it until mid-September.  The brown is a result of both lack of moisture and heat, causing the plant to be doubly stressed and begin dying well before its time.  And 2) look how tall that stalk is!  Josh is 5'7", so if you take into account that we cut the stalk off several inches above the ground and then measure from tip to tassel, we're dealing with a ten foot or greater stalk!  However...

...do you see anything missing?  There are very few ears of actual corn on the stalk in this field. Every seed company has several different varieties of seed corn that can be chosen from (commonly referred to by farmers as "numbers").  Just like a gardener can choose one variety of green bean (or pumpkin, or squash, or whatever) from among many at a gardening center, so can a farmer choose from a variety of seed corn.  Each variety is slightly different than the next and depending on what "number" was planted is how the field turned out.  We have a couple of fields planted in a certain number variety that produced nice ears and will make something, though a much smaller amount, despite the drought and heat.  Then again, we have some fields planted in a number that wasn't so drought resistant and, as the picture shows, produced little to nothing.

 Like I already explained, the corn was stressed by the extreme heat and lack of moisture.  So it spent what resources it had to produce energy to keep the stalk alive.  One could say it went into survival mode, not doing any more work than it needed to do.  Thus, it didn't put any effort to make an ear.  Also, there is a fine timing of  tasseling (the little shoots that put out at the top and the male part of the reproduction) and silking (the stringy stuff on the ears of the corn and the female reproductive part) that regulates pollination.  If that timing is off due to (guess what....?) stress caused by (guess what....?) weather, causing either the tassels or the silks (or both) to be of poor quality or develop at separate times, pollination is affected in a negative way.  It all has to do with the science of growing corn, but we'll just say that the corn's version of birds and the bees was greatly stressed and the result was....

...this.  The corn on the far right is an "okay" ear and the best we could find.  If all the corn were like this, it would produce a crop, though certainly not a bin-buster!  However, ears of this quality are far and very few between.  The three ears on the left are more representative of what we're finding (if finding anything at all.... remember all those stalks with nothing on them?).  These ears were not pollinated for the reasons already explained.  So there is a cob, but no corn.

So what is a farmer to do with fields of corn stalks that grew no corn?  Many farmers just harvest the grain to feed livestock or sell to an elevator.  We, however, have an alternative need for a corn crop other than just the grain...

This is a chopper.  A chopper cuts the stalk at the base and runs it through a series of knives within the machine, resulting in a finely chopped product called silage.  While it is certainly desired to have a good amount of corn in the silage, its not necessary.  The cows will eat and grow from this stalk product almost as well as if it had a great amount of corn in it.  The stalk alone still is a tremendous source of energy!

This is what the silage looks like.  On a normal year, we would still chop silage and store it in the silo or bag for winter and spring feed.  The difference is that this year, there is no corn sprinkled throughout it. 

Its not as simple as just chopping and storing this year, though.  There's  also a concern that since the corn died before it got a chance to breakdown the nitrogen it got from the soil, there could be too much nitrogen in the silage to safely feed livestock.  The solution comes with the fermenting process.  (Silage can easily be compared to sauerkraut: just as cabbage ferments to make kraut, so does chopped corn stalks ferment to become silage.)  As the silage ferments, the nitrogen will break down over time, dissipate and the silage will become safe for feed use. 

And you thought a farmer's job was easy and thoughtless!

Here's a picture of the bag.  Its a product called an AgBag, made of remarkably strong plastic.  Its weather resistant and will easily last a couple of years.  The piece of equipment on the right side of the picture is called a bagger, which has been explained about in a post long ago.  (I'll repost that post for my new readers so you can understand how the process works.)

Now about the pastures:

Explaining about the pastures is easy: they are all dried up.  The cows can't find grass to eat.  These pretty black cows should be standing in bright green grass up to their knees.  Instead, they are standing in the cowpaths to the feed areas where Josh and Loren are feeding from an extra bag of silage they put up last fall.

Another picture of the pasture.  The corn is sad, but for a cattle farmer, the lack of pasture can be devastating.  We thank God daily that the guys were given supernatural foresight last year to put up an extra bag of feed.  They had a nagging feeling that it would be needed and sure as the sun rises in the East, it came to be.  We are grateful for God's providence by this wisdom, knowing our herd will survive with a gracious feed source!

So we've seen the corn crop and we've seen the pastures, how about the hay ground?  Let me show you:

We took a little walk through the hay field Saturday afternoon looking to see just how thirsty the ground is.  The dryer the ground, the larger (wider and deeper) the cracks will be.  This picture shows a 26 inch deep crack.  It will take ALOT of rain to quench this drought!

Where three cracks meet, there was a five inch hole.  Folks, that's major!

Careful there!  You might lose a kid in crevices that big!

Or a cat!
BushHog was curious as to just why Josh was sticking that tape measure down that hole!
Funny stuff aside, hay ground that we should easily be able to get four cuttings off of has only produced one.  Maybe with some rain and the cooler Fall weather, we may be able to get another one off it.

Now the garden:

Despite our best efforts of watering the giant pumpkins, they died.

So did the flowers at the flagpole garden.

BUT our cactus that we've had for two years without growing an inch has been loving this weather!  You can see each growth spurt in the cactus by the indentions along the sides.  I bet its grown a good eight inches just in the past couple of months!

And just for fun:

The kids and I got Josh a giant rain gauge for Father's Day.  We got a storm the Saturday before Father's Day (June 16th) that produced over an inch of rain.  We gave Josh his rain gauge the next day and its only measured two tenths of rain since.  As of the date on this picture, it hadn't measured anything.

This picture was taken in mid-June when we got a little shower.  It didn't measure much, but we were already in dire need of moisture and rejoiced in even the littlest rainfall.  Here's Caleb dancing in the rain.

I LOVE this picture!  Sarah Rose was loving dancing in the rain, too!  What fun to be a kid!

Well, there ya go.  Just a few pictures and explanations of how things are.  There's more to be said about the drought and what it means, but that's for another post coming soon.