Imagine getting seven inches of rain in just less than two hours! That’s what happened last Friday night to Brady Bishop, who farms near the town of Livonia in Washington County. He tells Hoosier Ag Today that quite a few of his fields were flooded over the weekend.
“The gauges there at my dad’s—we had two there at his place, and one of them was a five-inch gauge. It was completely overflowing. The other one was up to seven,” according to Bishop, who also owns Bishop Seed Solutions and is a Channel Seed dealer.
He says that luckily, the flood damage to his crops isn’t widespread.
“As far as acres, it’s not going to be a drastic amount that will be replanted, but it’s just going to be a lot of pockets in quite a few different fields that may have two-to-five acres underwater in them that’s going to have to be spotted in,” he says. “Part of that field had over five inches of water standing on it there that night. So, I would say that I’d be very surprised if most of that doesn’t have to be replanted. Out of everything else that’s up, most of the water got away quickly enough. The rain came so fast, so I don’t think it’s going to be a huge widespread replant, just a lot of pockets and holes that are going to have to be fixed.”
Bishop says that hasn’t been dry enough yet this year for him to finish all of his planting.
“I still have about 120 acres left to plant. But of the ground that we have left, I honestly don’t know if there was a day this spring it would have been dried up to plant it or not,” says Bishop.
“From the forecast I’m seeing, we won’t be able to turn a wheel before it gets wet again. If it was to turn off 85 degrees and sunny from here on, the ground that we have left to plant on our farm, we’d be 5-to-7 days if it didn’t rain another drop before we would even be close to being able to get back into planting,” he says.
Even if you haven’t had flooding in your area, Bishop offers this advice to other farmers.
“The kind of the mentality that I’ve taken this spring is—as wet as what we’ve been, we got some crops right now that will need post sprayed within the next week to 10 days. I’m telling guys, ‘Go ahead and do that a little bit earlier rather than waiting right now,’” he says. “Just the way that this spring has been, I think a lot of us are going to get in trouble because we’ve got plenty of moisture. Once it gets warm, these crops are going to take off like crazy. So I think we need to pay a little bit more attention on being on the front side of things, just so we’re not late on getting critical things done like that.”
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