McHenry County farmers bracing for pain from spring rain

With heavy rain events becoming increasingly common in the area, McHenry County farmers are concerned whether they will have another delayed planting season.

"Because of just the sheer amount of precipitation that fell in the spring and how frequently it fell, farmers were unable to get into their fields and plant or even just prepare their fields for planting," state climatologist Trent Ford said.

Last spring, more than 40,000 acres were never planted in the county as heavy rain left fields underwater or sodden and unplantable, said Dan Ziller, president of the McHenry County Farmers Bureau. None of the 911 farms that make up 60% of the county's area were spared, according to 2012 census data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"I don't think there's a farmer in McHenry County that didn't see that challenge last year," Ziller said. "This is probably the worst year I've seen as far as unplanted acres in McHenry County."

Record-breaking rain and flooding caused monthslong delays in planting in 2019, and forced some farmers to make prevented-planting crop insurance claims because of the lost growing time. As a result, corn and soybean production dropped 18% and 20%, respectively, from 2018 levels, according to final yield numbers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. These rainfall trends are expected to become more common, Ford said. March through June is likely to be wetter than normal in Illinois, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Water-saturated soil in McHenry County is a worry for Ziller as he prepares for the 2020 planting season. Unsure whether the county will see another wet spring, he said the bureau is concerned about farmers' crop production this year. He said he wasn't able to plant 600 acres last year.

"The later you get into the season for planting, the less likely you are to have high yields," Ziller said. "The product isn't dry enough for the fall to harvest when it needs to be dry. So that delays and definitely causes challenges."

Marengo farmer John Bartman's income also took a hit last year when the weather affected about 2,000 acres of his farmland. To prepare for this year, the one thing he's doing right now, he said, is praying.

"It was a one-two punch last year from bad commodity prices and bad weather. If a farmer is not able to plant their crops in a timely manner in the springtime, they will not have an income for the rest of the year in the fall when the harvest is due," Bartman said. "So it's extremely crucial and important that farmers have made good spring, especially with these depressed commodity prices that we're dealing with today."

The increased precipitation and flooding is attributed to long-term climate change, Ford said. Just in the past 30 years, he said, the total annual precipitation in McHenry County has increased by 2.7 inches a decade.

"We have long-term climate change, and because of warming temperatures, especially in the winter and spring, that increases the water available for precipitation," he said. "When we do get that, we get more precipitation and heavier precipitation."

Adoption of new technology, irrigation management and use of cover crops, which are plants such as cereal rye used to prime and enrich soil that are not harvested as a cash crop, have become frequent methods for farmers to adapt. However, those methods aren't always enough, especially in McHenry County where water runoff management strategies are exacerbating the impact on farms.

"Here in McHenry County, we have a major runoff issue with development and uncontrolled growth in the area where the wastewater has nowhere to go and therefore it ends up going on a farmer's field," Bartman said.

The farm bureau sees the reactivation of drainage districts as one key solution to carrying away water runoff from developed land without damaging farm ground, Volkers said.

"We have several waterways that have not been maintained for 50 years or more. ... We're trying to reactivate the districts so that those waterways can be maintained," he said. "That's one of the efforts we're working on to get ahead of this flooding issue as we go forward, which would be a benefit to everybody."