SCOTTSBLUFF, Neb. – Livestock producers aren’t the only ones effected by the recent storms. Crop producers are facing unanticipated harvest shutdowns due to the snow and cold.

With the 2019 sugar beet harvest estimated at 86 percent complete, Jerry Darnell, vice-president of agriculture at the Western Sugar cooperative in Scottsbluff, said things are at a relative standstill, albeit a temporary one.

“That final 14 percent will probably be down the majority of this week because of this cold weather,” Darnell said. “We’ll hopefully resume harvest this Sunday.”

Digging operations on those final acres have halted due to concerns over potential damage to equipment – both in the field and at the processing plant. When digging beets from frozen ground, Darnell said, growers end up bringing stuff they don’t want into the plant along with the things they do.

“Now, they would be bringing in frozen soil,” he said. “That hurts the process. If they start bringing in frozen chunks of dirt, we just can’t handle that in our process.”

Yields are holding fairly steady, averaging 16.1 percent sugar and 26-tons per acre for much of the Panhandle and eastern Wyoming, Darnell said. That’s definitely down from previous growing seasons, but pretty much in line with what they were expecting when early harvest got underway last month.

And it’s not just the Wyo-Braska region – 2019 just wasn’t a good year for sugar beets, with excessive rain and uncooperative temperatures topping the list of issues impacting the growing season, Darnell said.

“Pretty much every sugar beet growing area in the United States is having a difficult harvest,” he said. “There’ve been different issues, but I don’t think any area has had an easy harvest.

“I think for most producers, it’s been a difficult year,” Darnell said. “Mother Nature just has not cooperated and they’re glad to have this year over with.”

Dry-down slows down

Corn producers, too, are dealing with the effects of the recent storms, said Dr. Cody Creech, dryland cropping system specialist with the University of Nebraska in Scottsbluff. Even the research and production fields at the Panhandle Research and Extension Center haven’t escaped the weather, he said.

“Just because it’s a little bit delayed with the growing season, a lot is still too high in moisture,” Creech said Tuesday. “Very few people have got into their corn fields yet.

“We picked some (at the PREC) this past weekend – the corn is still 17-18 percent, the corn we got into,” he said. “Even our production corn at the Station is just still too high” in moisture.

It goes back, at least in part, to planting delays caused by the late, wet spring and not enough heat units during the cooler summer growing season when the corn needed them the most, Creech said. A portion of the corn around the Wyo-Braska region simply didn’t have the time and conditions it needed to mature before that first freeze set in a couple weeks ago. And that’s leading to harvest issues now, he said.

“That was one concern we had with some of that corn that got in late,” Creech said. “If it’s not fully mature when it freezes – like a lot of the corn across the Corn Belt right now – that really delays its ability to dry down quickly.

“Now, with this latest storm and just a little bit of wind, we’re starting to see some corn starting to lay over,” he said. “And it’s just going to get worse as the wind and the weather keeps coming.”

As long as the ears stay on the stalks, lay-over corn is just more difficult to harvest, Creech said. Farmers have to go slower through the fields and there’s greater potential for higher harvest losses.

“It just doesn’t feed through the combine as nice,” he said.

Several Wyo-Braska crops are feeling the effects of the recent wintry weather. And in some cases, those affects have been positive ones.

Dryland corn producers had what could only be described as a boom year, due in part to the wetter-than-normal growing season this year, Creech said. Timely rains on dryland acres outside the Platte River Valley have produced yields of 100-bushels to the acre or more that typically average around 80 bushels, he said.

“The University research farm at Sidney averaged about 125 bushels per acre,” Creech said. “That’s a really good increase there. 

“Even our sunflowers saw probably an extra 300-400 pounds per acre with the added rainfall and good growing conditions we’ve had,” he said. “A lot of the dryland farmers are pretty happy with the results this year, if they were able to get their crops up and in the bins.”

Another bright note is there still should be enough corn already harvested or carried over from the 2018 growing season to supply cattle producers and feed lots, at least for the present, Creech said. But cattle producers could still be concerned about contract prices at a time when harvest numbers would have already been calculated in a normal year, he said.

“The delayed harvest is making it harder for the USDA to know what’s out there,” Creech said. “As a cattle guy, I’d think they’d be concerned about getting things contracted – where’s the price going to go? There’s still a lot of unknowns across the Corn Belt at this time.”