EDITOR’S NOTE: Information for the following story was drawn from information provided by the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture and the local Cooperative Extension Service office in Columbia County.
Overlapping storm events and near-historic river levels in Arkansas may mean total crop losses for producers in some counties, according to experts with the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture.
Storms that brought in torrential rains over the Memorial Day weekend were only the latest in a wet spring that continually pushed back planting for wheat, grains and other row crops, and has indefinitely delayed first cuttings of hay.
“Pastures and gardens were already running behind due to the extended cool spring. Now producers are dealing with conditions so wet it is difficult to get into a lot of places,” according to Jerri Lephiew, Staff Chair-Agriculture with the Columbia County Cooperative Extension Office. “Those that have very low lying situations have had to move stock, and several folks have replanted several times. Some people have indicated to me that they have given up on having a garden this year.”
County extension agents across the state said the saturated ground has made it impossible for hay growers to cut their meadows. According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service crop report released Monday, 50 percent of the state’s pastures were rated fair, poor or very poor, with just 11 percent rated excellent. Sixty-five percent of non-alfalfa hay was fair, poor or very poor. The hay crop in Arkansas was valued at $360.9 million in 2013, according to NASS.
“When the rain slows down be ready for army worms,” Lephiew said. “No reports of them have surfaced yet but it is really just a matter of time before they hit. With hay production as delayed as it has been, the last thing you want to do is let them have it.”
These wet weather conditions pose problems for livestock producers as well, Lephiew explained. “Livestock producers should really pay attention to worming with all this water around. Intestinal parasites thrive in this warm, moist environment. Animals with a heavy worm load just don’t perform at their potential.”
Joy West, interim Extension Service Staff Chair in Yell County, said creeks throughout that area have remained flooded since storms brought water over banks more than two weeks ago. She said cattle producers in the county have kept their herds at higher grounds during that period.
“They were scrambling that Monday to bring all their cattle up, and they haven’t been able to bring them back down yet, because the water isn’t really going down,” West said.
Stock health threatened
This spring’s wicked storms are giving Arkansas ranchers two kinds of headaches: Declining hay quality and increased concern for livestock health due to debris and bacteria stirred by floodwater.
Wind- and flood-borne debris can be deadly to cattle, goats and horses — a syndrome ranchers call “hardware disease.” Livestock owners should walk their fields to clear storm debris that could puncture an animal’s stomach or intestines or cause other internal injuries.
“Cattle grazing may not notice wood splinters, metal shards or construction items such as screws and nails,” said Tom Troxel, associate head-animal science for the University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture. “And sometimes, in fields that have old, rusting fences or bailing wire or where grazing occurs near construction - foreign objects wind up baled in hay.”
Flooding can also increase the danger of blackleg, a fatal disease caused by the Clostridium chauvoei bacterium.
“Blackleg is a soil-borne bacterium infection and any disturbance to the soil such as a flood may increase the exposure of the bacterium to the cattle,” Troxel said. “Blackleg is seasonal with most cases occurring in the warm months of the year - which is coming up. Excavation of soil or soil disturbance is also a concern.”
Blackleg symptoms include lameness, depression, fever but most of the time sudden death – meaning treatment is useless. Troxel said blackleg vaccine is one of the most inexpensive vaccines for cattle. It is recommended vaccinating all calves and also vaccinating the cows to ensure good maternal transfer for the next calf.
Floodwaters can transport the bacteria that cause leptospirosis, or “lepto,” to new fields. The bacteria’s maintenance hosts can include dogs, pigs and horses and wild hosts such as rats and other rodents, raccoons, skunks and possums.
“Lepto can be spread by wildlife urine,” Troxel said. “With the flood, the wildlife urine could be spread to farms or water puddles where lepto hadn’t been before.”
Symptoms of infection can include fever or lethargy, reduction in milk production or aborted calves. Disease prevention by vaccination is recommended.
Planting delayed
Lance Kirkpatrick, Extension Service Staff Chair for Sebastian County, said Tuesday that standing water in flooded areas of both Sebastian and Crawford Counties were higher and more widespread than local residents had seen in more than 30 years.
“If you can be more than 100 percent saturated, we’re there,” Kirkpatrick said. “There’s water in areas where it has not been in a long, long time.”
Kirkpatrick said that the timing now places Sebastian County growers in a “no man’s land” of planting. If predicted rains fall again this weekend, farmland probably won’t dry enough for planting until the second or third week of June. Approaching July and its summertime temperatures, there likely won’t be adequate rainfall for non-irrigated crops, he said.
“With corn, you just can’t plant it that late,” Kirkpatrick said. “You get it in the ground, and then you’ve got to get enough rainfall on it to get it up and producing, and it’s going to be pollinating right there in the heat of the summer, without any rainfall — that just makes for a disaster. Soybeans, you could roll the dice on those, but the bigger problem you run into is, if you don’t get them to make in time, then you get frost on them later on in the year,” he said. “It’s a ‘catch-22’.”
Kirkpatrick said that any hay that can eventually be harvested will be of “substantially diminished quality.”
He said many Sebastian County growers will have to rely on crop insurance to offset planting costs, and will simply face “a year without profit.”
In neighboring Logan County, several hundred acres of grasslands will probably miss their first cutting, having been under water for several weeks, said Bob Harper, the county’s interim Extension Service Staff Chair,.
“Ninety percent of the hay’s going to be reduced quality — it should have been cut two weeks ago, but nobody’s been able to cut it,” Harper said. “Ordinarily, that grass would’ve already been growing for two weeks by now, and be ready to cut in 3-4 weeks. But we’re still two weeks out from it being cut the first time.”
Andy Vangilder, Clay County Extension Office Staff Chair, said fescue is getting a little too mature for the first cutting. “The quality of the hay diminishes the older it gets,” he said. Several agents said the chances for harvest this week were low because of continued rain.
“Lots of pastures are over-mature and there are also many pastures and hay fields under water,” said Jesse Bocksnick, Perry County Extension Agent. “This is severely setting back hay harvest and limiting the amount of pasture to graze. Some producers are feeding hay left from last year because of this.
“When the water does come off the hay will be extremely dirty causing lots of wear and tear on the equipment not to mention the debris left deposited in the fields,” he said.
Brad Watkins, professor of agricultural economics for the UA Division System Division of Agriculture, said it was too early to calculate total losses in crop yields, quality or revenue.
“Growers have had a very narrow window for planting rice between rains,” Watkins said. “Normally, you want to stagger your planting, so that everything doesn’t all come up at once. That could cause problems in terms of lost quality — if it’s ready to harvest, and you can’t get to it in time, you lose quality and value.”
As the season moves on, later planting means less exposure to the sun throughout the remainder of the growing season, Watkins said, which typically means lower yields, particularly in grain.
Jarrod Hardke, extension rice agronomist for the UA System Division of Agriculture, described recent history of weather and agriculture in Arkansas as “a tale of two cities.”
“The southern half of the state gets one set of weather events, and the northern half gets another,” Hardke said. “It’s never consistent across the board.”
He said most of the severe weather events this spring have steered clear of the eastern half of the state, where most of the rice and soybeans are typically grown — although heavy rains did push rice plantings back until the final few weeks of the normal planting window.
“There wasn’t a ton of rice that went in the ground before the first week of may, when the vast majority of the rice planted north of I-40 all went in, in a 12- to 14-day period,” Hardke said. “Maybe as much as 75 percent of the rice north of I-40 went in in those 14 days.”
Hardke said that because 2015 has been such a strange year for weather and agriculture in Arkansas, normal benchmarks used to predict yields may not apply.
“It’s difficult to know exactly how it’s going to break, without being able to see what July and August temperatures, and nighttime temperatures, are going to be,” he said. “We’re kind of waiting on that to see what happens.”
Tony Franco, chief of farm programs for the Farm Service Agency’s Arkansas office, said several programs administered by the agency offer assistance to producers affected by recent weather events. Those programs include emergency loans, the Livestock Indemnity Program, Emergency Livestock Assistance Program, Emergency Conservation Program, the Tree Assistance Program and others.
Franco said that some programs issue emergency loans or cost share funds to help offset losses. He said the agency is currently taking applications from affected farmers.
Krista Guthrie, a spokesman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, said that as of Tuesday, Gov. Asa Hutchinson has declared emergencies in Franklin, Garland, Hempstead, Howard, Independence, Izard, Johnson, Little River, Marion, Montgomery, Newton, Nevada, Pike, Polk, Pope, Searcy and Yell counties.
Residents of Howard, Hempstead and Pike counties are eligible for individual assistance, Guthrie said. Damage assessments for the 17 counties are scheduled to begin June 28.