A Year Like No Other

2019 was terribly stressful. Extremely frustrating, we couldn’t seem to do anything right. We’re facing things we’ve never seen. Emotions, the stress of it all runs high. Producers were changing their direction daily. Making plans was very challenging. We were changing our plans by the hour. Not only can’t get it planted, you can’t combine your wheat, you can’t get the weed sprayed and you can’t plant the cover crop. You know you just didn’t know what to do. You just don’t sleep that well. How much can you take When you get 40 inches of rain and you’re in the year before it was 39 that’s a high level rainfall. We’re missing miles and miles of fence probably somewhere between seven and eight miles of fence.

Some of it we haven’t even seen 00:57 - yet that’s still in water. All this rain that’s come and it was a depressing year trying to figure out what strategies you could use, how to manage the moisture how to get anything done. One of my biggest challenges was some of them fields you got planted late it really took a hit on the yields and it wasn’t bad enough to collect on crop insurance but it wasn’t good enough to really make any money on. 2019 was a challenge I had a field that was just too wet and we went out and tried a couple times we were making ruts and getting stuck we weren’t really allowed the opportunity to do what we normally like to do and frustrating that we only had a tight window of opportunity to get any work done. We’ve got a lot of work from 2019 that we don’t know when we’ll get it done just the sheer amount of dead trees and things that have flooded into our property we’ve got a lot of work there we’ve had enough rain that we went in the spring of ‘19 with a full profile.

Economics are definitely kicking in, rural family stress, bankers are 02:14 - feeling it, main streets feeling it. The economic thing you don’t get your crop back in cash rents or do your prepays. There’s enough emotion inthe farm thing and then you got the finances. Wow. 2019 was probably the first year that my soil health farmers and no- till farmers struggled as well but there was a caveat with every conversation I had. They all said that they’re not going to change a thing in fact they’re going to do more to improve their soil because they realize how important the soil health was–the soil conditions the physical properties–were to get them through 2019.

03:12 - Our soil health producers I think they won the battle I think others are gonna pay attention to that and adoptions gonna further increase. .