News

Planting concerns pile up alongside record snowfall

A southwest Minnesota farmer is extremely concerned about planting delays this spring.

Brandon Fast of Mountain Lake says it will need to warm up quickly after a record amount of snowfall in February.

“After not an extremely wet fall, but a fairly wet fall, we definitely need things to turn around so we can end up having some drier weather.”

Parts of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa received more than a foot of snow over the weekend.

Fast tells Brownfield a repeat of last spring would be bad for him and many others in the Upper Midwest.

“It’s a little concerning. We plant a lot of later maturity corn because we’ve seen a bigger yield advantage, and we had to switch all that last year to some earlier maturing corn and we sure hope we don’t end up in that same situation again.”

Before the weekend blizzard, the Twin Cities had already broken the record for snowiest February with more than 31 inches, nine inches above the previous record set in 1962.