A Wild Weather Week: What Will Harvest Look Like Now?
Things can change fast once August hits. Some years it’s hot and dry and the crops finish quicker than we had planned. Other years, we get lots of rain and it pushes the harvest start date back by a week or so. Then there is the rare perfect year where everything goes according to plan. And yet other times, we have a bad storm come through which changes everything. One year ago, on August 10, 2020, a large line of severe thunderstorms ripped through the Midwest. It was large enough to be classified as a “derecho”. To be classified as a derecho, a storm must have wind gusts of at least 58 mph along most of it’s path, along with several gusts of 75 mph or greater, and travel at least 250 miles. Since the August Derecho traveled through Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana it more than met the 250 mile qualification. It resulted in wind damage to an area more the 90,000 square miles, produced 26 tornadoes, and had a peak wind gust of over 140 mph. It became the costliest known thunderstorm event in modern US history with $11.5 billion in damage. Here in Bureau Township, we were lucky. It had weakened a little bit before it got to us and didn’t do much damage in our immediate area. It picked up steam again as it passed over us and hit Princeton and east of here a lot harder. If you want to know more about the August 2020 Derecho, the National Weather Service’s website has a write up about it here.
As we went into last week remembering last year’s derecho, we couldn’t have predicted what Mother Nature had in store for us this year. It had been hot and muggy, we had been under a heat advisory for several days. It was forecasted to cool down, so strong storms were not out of the realm of possibility. Monday night (the 9th) was the first round. There were several severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings around Northern Illinois. We were “lucky” enough to be able to watch a small tornado form, touch down, and stay on the ground for about a mile. It formed about a mile east of the bin site, which is way too close for comfort! It stayed in the fields and luckily didn’t hit or damage any structures. It wasn’t large enough to rate on the EF scale and we don’t know what the peak wind gusts were. But we can now say that we have seen a tornado in real life, and we don’t need to see any more! The largest tornado in our area was in Arlington, which is about 30 miles east of us. It was classified as an EF-1 with about a 3 mile track and estimated peak winds of 105 mph. It damaged crops and several buildings in it’s path, but thankfully, no one was injured. The storms brought no relief to the hot and humid weather and we were still under a heat advisory. Tuesday, the one year anniversary of the 2020 Derecho, was much calmer, but some small storms did pop up in the evening bringing some rain and a few wind gusts.
The morning of Wednesday the 11th it was still hot and humid. Around 9:00am, Bureau County was placed under a severe thunderstorm warning with radar indicated high winds and hail. We had been watching a storm build west of us for awhile, and we knew that we weren’t going to get as lucky as we had on Monday. The sky had a green-blue tint to it, and it looked eerily similar to the storm that damaged the bin site in June of last year. We all hunkered down in the shop to ride it out. The wind was steady and intense, we’re guessing it lasted for about 20 minutes or so, but it seemed a lot longer than that. At one point we watched a bucket blow east across the yard, then immediately turn around and blow back to the west. Once the wind let up, we all headed out to see what the damage was. The first stop we made was the bin site, and thankfully, that was all fine. After breathing a HUGE sign of relief, we started driving around to check everything else out. All of our buildings and houses were fine, but there was a lot of tree and crop damage. The corn really took a beating, with some of it completely flat on the ground. Official reports list the wind speed in excess of 60 mph around Princeton, but we have heard rumors of wind speeds up to 90 mph. We have also heard that they clocked the wind speed at the Bureau Valley High School windmill at 104 mph. We didn’t have any hail damage to our farms, but there was quite a bit of hail northwest of us. After just a half hour, everything had changed.
After giving the corn a few days to (hopefully) stand back up, we started flying the drone this week. Unfortunately, things seem to be worse than we had originally thought. The storm tracked through the majority of our corn acres, and a lot of our farms were hit hard. Now that the plants have been damaged, a disease known as Tar Spot has started to move in. Tar Spot is a newer disease, and we don’t know much about it yet. It seems like healthy plants are able to fend it off, but if they are stressed or damaged, it can really take hold. In the last few days, we have noticed considerably more Tar Spot in our fields than was there even just a few days ago. The corn hasn’t really stood back up, like it would have if the storm was earlier in the growing season. Everything is too mature and now that Tar Spot has started to move in, we are afraid that the plants will just give up and start to die. All we can do at this point is try to come up with the best way to harvest everything. It has been difficult to come up with a plan since things seem to change every day. Right now, our plan is to go out as early as possible and try to harvest the corn before disease and gravity make it any worse. We have also bought rolling cones and a reel for the corn heads. Rolling cones go on the two outside snouts of the corn heads and spin, which helps keep the plants from flopping over and getting caught on the sides of the head. A reel is like what is on a soybean platform, and basically serves the same purpose: to help guide the plants into the head so you don’t go over them and leave them behind. We are hoping that we won’t have to use the reel, but wanted to get one ordered and on the farm so that it’s here in case we need it. Since we didn’t have the hail that other areas had, the soybeans weathered the storm better, but they still got stirred up pretty good. We don’t know what effect that will have on their potential yet, but as we get closer to harvest we should have a better idea. We are getting a little snapshot of what the farmers in Iowa experienced in the aftermath of the 2020 Derecho, and it’s not very much fun.
It’s been pretty gloomy around here for the past several days, and it’s been hard trying to find the bright spots. But we did have one this week. We got a new-to-us John Deere 8400R, which we plan to use to pull the strip till bars. We also bought a 1947 John Deere B. Not very practical, but still fun! It’s amazing to look at the difference between the two tractors and see how much the machinery needs and technology has changed in the past 70 years. No matter how we handle it, harvest is going to be difficult, but at least we will be able to use the now fully-functional bin site for the first time! The next time I post, harvest will probably have started and we have a better idea of what exactly it is going to look like. In the meantime; stay safe and enjoy the rest of the summer!
