Nearing storm seen as risk to harvest

Arkansas growers will be paying closer attention to their weather apps with the development of Tropical Depression 9 and a forecast path that could send the storm’s wind and rain to the Delta by early next week.

The storm was churning Thursday in the Caribbean southwest of Jamaica, making its appearance a year after the remnants of Hurricane Laura battered crops in Arkansas and elsewhere in the mid-South.

The National Hurricane Center’s “cone” forecast showed the storm was expected to gain hurricane strength to be named Ida by Saturday morning, make landfall in Louisiana between Sunday and Monday, then drift northward after downgrading to a depression.

“With harvest getting started, rains and storms will delay that across crops,” Jarrod Hardke, extension rice agronomist for the University of Arkansas System’s Agriculture Division, said Thursday.

“In rice, there’s the potential for lodging and reduced grain quality in fields ready for harvest,” he said. Lodging occurs when winds or heavy rains flatten crops, making them difficult for harvesting equipment to pick up.

“Late-planted crops are at increased disease risk with added moisture and high humidity,” Hardke said.

Corn producers will be facing the same issues with the potential not only for lodging, and harvest loss but also grain quality, said Jason Kelley, extension wheat and feed grains agronomist for the Agriculture Division.

“Grain sorghum growers would be worried about the grains sprouting in the seed head, especially if the rain lingers,” Kelley said.

Lodging is also a concern for soybean producers, said Jeremy Ross, extension soybean agronomist for the division.

“We have more late planted soybean fields this year than normal, and many of these fields have several weeks before maturity. Once the soybeans are lodged and tangled, disease and insect concerns will increase,” he said. There won’t be any “air flow to help reduce disease pressure. Plus, it’s difficult to get fungicides and insecticides down into the canopy with lodged soybeans.

“Another concern is seed quality with lodged soybean,” he said. “Higher moisture and humidity in a lodged canopy could cause seed rot and sprouting.”

Cotton harvest is a little more than a month away, with only a few bolls open, said Bill Robertson, extension cotton agronomist.

“A little bit of rain won’t hurt. This is the time we are putting our last irrigation out,” he said. “A lot of farmers are holding off on that last irrigation in anticipation of this hurricane coming.”

However, “a lot of rain and a lot of wind is going to be bad,” Robertson said.

“Right now, the plants are top-heavy,” he said. “When we get the leaves all wet, it’s easy for a big windstorm to lay the cotton plants on the ground. Once the bolls hit the ground in dense canopy they are going to rot. This is what happened last year. We lost a lot to rot.”

“Sometimes the plants will stand back up some, but once the fruit hits the ground, it’s gone,” Robertson said.

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