Christmas Crop Conditions

Received word this morning from "Tall" Todd, the custom harvest guy who comes up here to the Golden Triangle every summer. Todd has been in touch with Terry Lemmon from "The Gin" down in the Harrold/Vernon, Texas area & Terry is saying that if they don't get moisture within the next 2 weeks to forget coming down this next spring. He said that the terrace tops are drier than dry; the fields are brown, the cattle can't be put on the winter wheat to graze because they are pulling out the grain by the roots; the cotton wasn't worth cutting in their area & they are hauling cotton from north of the River in the Frederick, Oklahoma area, as that area had enough moisture to produce a cotton crop! The drought is all the way through Oklahoma & north into Kansas. Jim Routen in Kansas says that there is a lot of grain laying unsprouted, in dry dirt. Keep in mind that a lot of seeding is done with disc drills, so it is not put in very deep, but does not dry out the soil as much as the shoe drills does. Over in Colorado, the Linnenberg's told Todd earlier that he needed to get at least one "stripper header" (no, that's not the boss of women dancers at a gentlemen's club!), as they were into a wheat, corn, corn, fallow rotation, but now they tell him to forget that as their dry land corn out in the Byers, Colorado area failed this year & they're rethinking their rotation plan. "Talkative" Todd says that they are realizing they are in the High Desert of the Great American Desert & that corn does not seem to do well in the Desert! We are most blessed here in the Golden Triangle & north central Montana & look forward to Todd when he returns in the summer to take care of next season's crop!