How Nebraska farmers adjusted to a dry harvest season

WAVERLY, Neb. (KLKN) – Hot, dry conditions this harvest season made some farmers worried their crops wouldn’t survive.

A farmer near Waverly, Tom Peterson, said this year was one of the driest seasons he’s seen in a while.

“You don’t plan on a drought,” he said. “You plan to raise a good crop and enough moisture to get you through.”

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Despite the inconvenient weather, he said harvest season went better than expected.

He said he’s noticed a trend of dry seasons in the last three years, so this year, he planned ahead.

“We kind of limited our seed population, like in corn,” he said. “You can push your higher yields if you have enough water, but we figured we didn’t have enough water. We backed down just a little bit.”

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Another challenge he faced was fire risk.

A combine sparked a fire on his neighbor’s land that Peterson thinks burned about 300 acres.

“It was a hard one to stop that one with that wind,” he said.

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Luckily, Peterson had finished harvesting in the area the day before.

“They lost some stalk ground, and I think some of the corn was standing corn that was still there,” he said. “We just combined that the day before and moved the machinery out of there in the morning.”

He stopped harvesting for about three or four days due to the fire risk.

“Everybody was a little worried for several days,” he said. “This wasn’t the only fire; there were several around. There was days you just had to shut down just as a precaution to make sure nothing got away from you.”

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Thankfully, he was able to catch up without any problems.

He said because he started harvesting early, he finished early.

“We didn’t get any rain delays, no big delays of any kind,” he said. “So it was kind of a straight-through harvest this year, which is unusual for us.”

Peterson said after harvest, he was raising cattle and waiting for it to rain.

After Monday’s downpour, he’s waiting for the soil to dry up so he can start dirt work.

“I mean, you need a little moisture in the soil to be able to pack it and make things work in dirt,” he said. “And without that moisture, we couldn’t do a lot of that either. And now it’s been raining ever since.”