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Missouri farmer finishes harvest on ice

A Missouri farmer is one of many who finished harvesting this month because of a too wet fall and early winter. “It was the worst fall I’d ever experienced in my life,” says Richard Oswald who farms in the Missouri River bottomlands of northwest Missouri’s Atchison County which borders both Nebraska and Iowa. He tells Brownfield Ag News the Corps of Engineers kept the water table high which didn’t allow for good drainage on top of having a lot of rain, “When it finally froze up and we picked the last field of corn we were literally driving on ice. The whole field was like an ice skating rink.” Oswald is concerned about this coming spring, “The ground is covered with snow and there’s mud underneath so I think it’ll be a tough spring here for planting decisions.” Oswald finished harvesting corn and beans the second week of January. Atchison is one of the few northern Missouri counties that did not go through the 2018 drought.