Farm Bureau: Wettest Planting Season We’ve Ever Seen

(News/Talk 1480 WHBC) – Mother Nature is really making things rough on farmers in Ohio and across the country.

“It looks like this is probably the wettest planting season we’ve had on record, and it’s really caused our farmers to get way behind,” said Nick Kennedy with the Stark County Farm Bureau.

He says, thanks to wet fields, Ohio farmers have only planted about 22 percent of their corn so far, when typically that number is around 78 percent at this time of the planting season.

Only around 11 percent of soybeans are in the ground when that number should be closer to 55 percent.

He says storms have been dumping a lot of rain on fields that are already saturated, and they just don’t have time to dry out before the next storm.

Kennedy says even if the weather cooperates perfectly from now on, some farmers are already looking at taking a loss this year due to the wet weather.

“All we can do is hope that we get a good stretch of about a week or so of dry weather to dry things out and allow our folks to get out there and finish off, or at least get farther along than they are today.”

He says the talk about tariffs and a volatile market also aren’t helping farmers sleep well at night.