In many cases, the excessive rain delayed planting, resulting in fewer acres sown and diminished yield potential due to the shortened growing season. Worse still, some farmers saw their initial planting efforts completely washed away, forcing them to replant or abandon entire crops for the year.
“It’s really been one extreme to the other,“ said Ohio Farmers Bureau spokesman Ty Higgins. “Some parts of Ohio now have too much rain, some of the same parts that were bone dry just 12 months ago.”
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
This year has seen 29.23 inches of precipitation fall by July 31 in the area, as opposed to the normal amount of 25.99 inches, according to the National Weather Service’s Wilmington office.
Last year by July 31, the Dayton area had seen just 24.61 inches of precipitation, NWS told this news outlet Friday.
In April and May this year, the Dayton area saw 6.15 inches and 5 inches of precipitation, respectively. Normal precipitation for those months is 4.46 and 4.51 inches, respectively.
Last year, those months saw 4.51 and 3.93 inches, respectively before drought conditions arrived in late June, kicking off what ranked as the seventh driest summer on record for the state, according the Ohio State University Extension.
The good news, Higgins said, is that the vast majority of crops across Ohio are in good condition this summer, but sometimes there can be too much of a good thing when it comes to moisture.
“We have disease pressures, more pest pressures when we have that type of weather, of course, when the ground gets overly saturated,” he said. “The crops just don’t perform as well as they would if they had a little bit more sunshine and drier weather.”
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
Higgins said the rain that fell earlier this year was “relentless.”
“It would rain every two or three days and for a lot of the farmers across the state, they need a good, solid five to seven days of dry weather to get the soil where it needs to get in order to get the crop in the ground,” he said.
Darke County farmer Greg McGlinch said he got a late start planting corn and soybean crops due to the wet weather.
“They’re a little behind, but the heat’s helped move some of this stuff along,” said McGlinch, a fifth-generation farmer. “When you get a little bit in the 90s without moisture ... it can set the crop back a little bit because corn can handle some of this heat stress a little better than than the soybeans. But when we get (temperatures in the) upper 90s and if we don’t get enough moisture, it (the corn) just starts to curl up to protect itself.”
Frequent spring rains can hinder planting conditions by making clay soils wet and compact, which can restrict root growth and water movement, leading to problems throughout the growing season, particularly if dry weather follows, he said.
McGlinch, who plants corn, soybeans, cereal rye, wheat and other crops, said last year’s growing season looked better than this year’s “just because we had a later start (this year), and the spring slowed our progression down.”
Brian Harbage, who farms corn, wheat and soybeans in Clark County’s South Charleston, said last year’s drought reduced his crop yield by 20% to 25%.
This year, he said he has managed to plant the same crop size as usual, but had trouble getting crops in the ground.
“As we were trying to get planted, it was just relentless rain,” he said. “We had limited windows to get planted, very small windows.”
Harbage, a seventh-generation farmer, said that made things “super challenging” and planting dragged on to “a lot later than a person would want.”
“Typically, we want to get planted between April 15 and May 15 and this year we were (done planting) clear out in the end of June,” he said. “Yields will be down because of that.”
Ohio Department of Agriculture Director Brian Baldridge said his department has heard from farmers who have had to go back in and do some replanting, not once, but even twice because of excessive rainfall earlier on.
“Now we’re having this heat, which is very good for our growing season, on our crop,” he said. “So if you got those crops planted as quick as you could, you’re doing fairly decent. We just have to wait and see what are the challenges that move forward, whether it’s additional fungus in our fields because (of) the additional rain and humidity, and just kind of see where the crops take us.”
Credit: Nick Graham
Credit: Nick Graham
Tim Hasselbrock, a third-generation farmer, tends to crops in Butler County’s Morgan Twp. and also in eastern Indiana. He grows corn and soybean with some wheat and hay.
He said last year was “a dry, dry season,” one that saw less than half of what his crops should have produced on the 3,000 or so acres to which his family tends.
This year has been a different story when it comes to precipitation.
“Up until the end of April, (there) wasn’t excessive moisture, it was just cold and wet,” he said. “But when May started and it just rained continuously, I know there’s some people that had to replant two and three times their corn, parts of the field, and some whole fields. The flatter the fields, of course, the more ponding there was in them.”
Baldridge said one of the things that helped farmers last year was a $10 million disaster relief package the State Legislature, led by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, provided to Ohio farmers feeling “the worst of the worst of the drought.”
“It was just a kind of a little extra help that these farmers really needed to lift them up during that severe drought that occurred last year,” he said.
Higgins said assistance this year and beyond for the state’s $124 billion agriculture industry will arrive via President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.
Credit: Bryant Billing
Credit: Bryant Billing
“There are quite a bit of farm bill provisions in that law that are going to help farmers navigate these tough times, not just this year, but for the next few years to come,” Higgins said.
Also, when crops face various climate-related challenges, new technologies can be helpful, Higgins said.
“They have larger planters. They have planters that can plant at a faster rate, so they’re able to use new technologies to mitigate the challenges that they’ve seen Mother Nature deal them for really the past couple of decades,” he said. “There really hasn’t been an ideal season for planting or harvest, but farmers are still finding a way to get it done thanks to technologies they’re seeing at their disposal.”
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