4-18 IAN Jensen Field

 You’ve probably heard that old cliché. In Idaho if you don’t like the weather, just wait 5 min. and it will change. Well not this year. It was rain, then more rain, interspersed with rain. We’ll talk about the effects when we come back. Last week, we did a story on Vaughn Jensen who is a hay, wheat, and corn farmer and he was telling us that it was too wet to get a crop in. I went out to his field to visit him and here’s an update. “April 11 is the latest that we have ever started fieldwork. That’s the date we started this year on this field right here.  This field was fall to old and isn’t too bad, the dirt is pretty mellow anything that didn’t have any primary tillage last fall we tried to do some primary tillage now but it’s way too muddy. Right now we’re waiting on the rest of it. What does that mean when you’re planning your overall farming season with the late start? How does that steamroll and affect you down the road? On spring wheat, if we can get it in 1 March, it usually does fairly well and planting this late it seems that if it gets heat before it’s finished maturing that reduces the yield and  also tends to get heat in smaller stages of growth where it doesn’t tiller as well, so we will quite likely have a yield reduction in spring wheat and as a result we have cut the acres that we are going to plant as much as possible and will probably shift those two corn.