Ag Weather Impacts

Ag Weather Impacts

Wheat harvest is progressing rapidly across the Columbia Basin thanks to a very dry July. Earlier this week, I spoke with Tom Reitmann who farms in Gilliam County in the Ajax area and also has some barley to the south of Condon in the Mayville area. Tom had been cutting for about a week, but stopped on Wednesday due to extreme fire weather conditions.

Tom:

We decided not to harvest today, because everybody in Sherman County is busy with that fire and one of our employees in fact is over there helping. We had a lot of smoke last night and there was a lot of soot actually falling from the sky, that was kind of unusual.

The lack of rain during May and June hurt potential yields.

Tom:

We can see the difference in the deep soil and the shallow soil particularly this year because we didn't get very much spring rain. So the deeper soils yielded average and the shallow soils were below average.

An isolated thunderstorm June 21st June missed Tom's farm and brought over an inch beneficial rain to farms in the Condon area, but also flash flooding in Condon.

Tom:

It washed down main street and in fact the water ran right through the post office and we had to go to Fossil to get our mail, while they cleaned up the post office.

Thanks to Tom Reitmann for giving us a Gilliam County Harvest update. Good luck to all the harvest crews getting the wheat into the bin safely.

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