The Great Fall Flood

So this post is a little late, but here goes.

About a week and a half ago we got a ton of rain. Some areas got up to 6" of rain on already saturated ground. We didn't get quite that much, but we got plenty. Fortunately for us, our worst field had already been harvested for corn silage.

Corn silage was an adventure this year. Our cows eat a variety of grain and forage. We feed them a mixture of ground corn, dry hay, haylage (fermented alfalfa), and corn silage (the entire corn plant, chopped and fermented). Some years we also do wet corn (corn at a higher moisture than typically harvested) or earlage (the ear of corn, husk, cob, and all, chopped up). With all the rain we'd been getting our silage didn't get harvested until later than usual. We ended up having to have a neighbor chop the last bag of silage with his self-propelled chopper since there was no way our pull type chopper would make it through. Fortunately we finished, but our neighbor wasn't so fortunate. He chopped half a bag after we finished ours, but then got rained out. The bag sat open (which drove Pat nuts since silage spoils easily) for over a week until he finished it the other day. Silage is ideally chopped when the corn plant is still fairly green, but some years you don't get ideal.

We didn't get any wet corn or earlage harvested this year, but our cows can do without. The important thing is that they get a mixture of forages and grain and our hay crop this year was fantastic.

After a week of drying the guys have been off trying to find dry fields to combine soy beans. We've gotten out a few fields and so far the yield has been great. They are anticipating a long harvest, especially since one of Pat's uncle's fields went under water earlier this week. The water is receding, but the damage has been done.

Here are a couple of pictures taken about a mile from our house. In our area, we have a series of deep drainage ditches that dump into local rivers. The drainage ditches were full (the one by our house has got to be at least 12' deep) and overflowed into the road ditches and fields. The 6" of rain they got to the south of us also had to travel up these drainage ditches, which caused the loss of Pat's uncle's field.

These pictures are pretty mild compared to some of the flooding to the west of us. I didn't go for a drive out that way when it was at its worst and the couple of times I was out there I didn't have my camera, go figure!