By Bob Strohm
bstrohm@wbcowqel.com

With the season of summer giving way to autumn it means a changing of the leaves and colder temperatures. To the many farmers in the county, it means harvest season.

Having to deal with more precipitation than normal during the growing season, some crops are ready to come off with many fields of beans and corn already harvested.

Roger Auck has said that the weather conditions have been excellent for the crops in the county.

“Yield-wise, I haven’t seen that part yet, but the weather conditions have been excellent. This is the end of September and the majority of the beans are off and a lot of corn is off already, and we have good conditions for fall tillage already,” Auck said. “This is something that hasn’t been normal in a long time. The rain gave us some decent yields but there are good yields and bad yields all in the same pass in the fields. It all depends on the field. “

Blaine Rowlinson explained that so far yields have been better than expected.

“What we noticed is the yields have been better than expected at least in Crawford County,” Rowlinson said. “Now you get up north and they aren’t that great.”

Rowlinson explained why tiled fields have done better than non-tiled fields this harvest season.

“The reason the tiled did better was because we had such a wet spring, so the fields that were tiled the water was able to get away and the fields that weren’t tiled, the field just sat with water and then the crops couldn’t take (it) so it just hurt them,” Rowlinson said.

Rowlinson also noted that as a result of the rain the topography of the fields also played a factor.

“Normally where if you have a dry year your hills won’t do anything, this year where they had rain it kept them moist when they needed it, but it shed the excess off. So the hills did very good this year,” Rowlinson said.

Don Frombaugh added that the precipitation created variances with places that had rain.

“There have been a lot of variances. We have had a lot of rain in places and down the road not as much.”

Frombaugh said that overall for the county the harvest is ahead of schedule.

“Harvest is way ahead, very rarely I have half my beans off by Oct. 1,” Frombaugh said.”In this area we are probably 75 percent done with it.”