Rain’s not all good for area farmers
Published 12:19 am Wednesday, July 24, 2013
Farmers are struggling to preserve their crops during this overwhelmingly rainy summer season.
Ricky Wiggins of Wiggins Farms in the Carolina area, said the rain has been positive in some aspects and negative in others.
“(The rain) has been really good on the pasture,” Wiggins said. “But it’s been a little bit too much on the cotton and the peanuts.”
He said that the crops are not currently receiving enough nutrients due to “drowning out” of the crops’ root system.
“A week of sunshine would make a lot of difference,” Wiggins said.
Farmers in other parts of the state are struggling as well, according to a report from the Alabama Department of Agriculture and Industries.
Other extension agents reported that vegetable producers were concerned about the rain and potential diseases to all crops and that most fields were too wet to treat for pests.
Chuck Simon, Covington County extension coordinator, said Covington County has plenty of forage but needed dry weather to cut hay.
“We’ve got a lot of things we need to be doing,” Wiggins said. “We need to be out spreading a little fertilizer. We need to putting on insecticides and fungicides.
“We need to be doing all of that but we can’t do it, and nobody else can either.”
Covington County is expected to experience cloudy weather and showers for the rest of the week, according to the seven-day forecast.
Before Tuesday afternoon’s storm system moved through, 10.86 inches of rain had been recorded in Andalusia in July.