News

Minnesota farmer encouraged by soil moisture

A Minnesota crop and dairy farmer is encouraged by soil moisture levels to begin the growing season.

Charles Krause milks around 350 Holstein cows near Buffalo and says he wasn’t surprised by an early April snowstorm.

“That’s pretty normal for April, it’ll be 70 degrees one day and 20 the next. But we’ve gotten moisture recently in the last couple weeks, we’ve gotten rains and snows and that’s soaking in. So I think once it straightens out a little bit we’ll be rolling.”

He tells Brownfield a lack of snow cover on alfalfa fields during the winter is a concern.

“So I’m hoping that the alfalfa crop made it through, I guess we should know by the first week of May or so whether it’s greening up or not and we’ll see what happens there. But we’ll go to Plan B if it didn’t.”

USDA rates Minnesota’s topsoil moisture levels at around 24 percent short and 63 percent adequate.