Here's how wet it was...

In early October I called a veteran crop consultant who operates in southeast Arkansas. I wanted to get an update for my newsletters. The guy works cotton, rice and grains, including soybeans, and I started by asking, "Where are you today?" Meaning, what part of your territory are you in at the moment.

He said, "New Hampshire."

I wasn't aware of a town in Arkansas with that name. I asked, "Where is that?" He said, "New England."

He said that it was too wet to do anything in the fields and no spraying was immediately possible for anything, plus more and more rain was in the forecast. Some fields were all or partially flooded. Essentially, it was like a hurricane without the wind. Plenty of areas in the Midsouth got 20 inches of rain or more in that period. (The area agronomist in my part of the state (central Mississippi) put out an advisory last month to help people decide the soil nutrient value of unharvested soybeans, which amount to an unintended cover crop.)

Anyway, the consultant decided there was no reason to stick around for at least the next 10 days, and doing so would only depress him further. So, he and his wife decided to drive to New England to see the fall foliage.

Frankly, I had been struggling with somewhat the same thing because my reports across much of the South were simply turning into weather reports and rainfall accumulation reports. I pulled back on publishing for a couple of weeks during that same period, and my wife (who's also my business partner) and I flew to Boston to attend an internet conference that we had previously figured we couldn't attend. In 20 years of producing crop and pest reports, I have never deviated from the schedule like that, even when Katrina hit.

Sorry for rambling on. But that's how wet it was and explains why yields tanked so much here and in some other parts of the South.

And it's raining right now. I keep thinking about what Hans Solo said during a tight spot in the first Star Wars movie.

"I've got a bad feeling about this."