Perry County Farmers Will Plow Many Crops under This Year

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[You can stand by the side of the Dowell Road and watch the corn stalks change colors from green, to blue-gray and finally to burnt white.

According to Greg Bigham of Bigham Farms many of these fields will never be harvested, but instead plowed under.

It's bad enough that the corn planted in late March or April won't make it, but now it's too late for the corn that was planted later, agrees Rick Krone, another one of Perry County's largest agri-businessmen.

The felony is compounded by the fact that rain which was forecast for Saturday is out of the forecast and its so dry tasseling corn can't and won't pollinate.

"On the day you plant corn, you pretty well know the day you will be harvesting it," says Bigham. Corn is that predictable and the growing season isn't very forgiving.

Soybean maturity isn't as predictable and beans could come out of it if conditions improve. But, flowering plants will be small and low to the ground and hard to harvest, he said.

"The corn crop is bleak. Quite a few acres we won't even harvest," he said. "It will be near zero."

"We've got crop insurance," he said. "You can buy different levels. The higher the level of coverage, the larger the premium. Every farmer is going to be different."

The family farms acreage from DeSoto to Sparta and from Vergennes north into Washington County.

"You have $500 an acre invested in a corn crop. The profit might be $150 an acre a year, so this can be devastating. He said the market is starting to mirror the drought with prices higher in the last seven days. It will hurt livestock farmers who buy corn for feed. It's like throwing a rock in a pond and watching in ripple."

Krone told the newspaper, "Farmers get too comfortable after years of good crops. You expect a year like this, but we sure can't afford two years in a row like this," he said.

He agreed with Bigham that this is bad.

"It's worse than the year (President) Reagan was here (1988)," he said.

The Illinois Farm Bureau is predicting many crops in southern Illinois could be lost due to a drought expected to last through late September.

The U.S. Drought Report, a collaboration between federal and state officials, reported that 70% of the Illinois is currently experiencing "abnormally dry" to "extreme drought" conditions.