Harvest season is underway for farmers as the weather has finally let up. Henderson County farmer Shane Gipe says that as he got into some of his first irrigated corn fields, he was surprised to see yields not too far off from past years.
“The soils in this field are a little bit more sandy, a little more variable. We are very close to the river here, on my father-in-law Mike Bundy’s home farm,” says Gipe. “This farm has been irrigated forever. It’s got a pivot irrigation on it, and basically, whenever we feel like we need some moisture in the soil or we need a rain, we fire that baby up and make it happen.”
Looking back on the growing season, Gipe says more frequent rainfall meant they didn’t have to run the irrigation systems as often.
“For what we consider a watering season for a typical year, June into July, we had some big rains, frequent rains, so we didn’t run them near as often this year as we typically would have. So, I mean, that was a nice break,” says Gipe. “We do use those pivots as part of our fertility program. So there were times there where we probably went a little longer between fertilizer applications because of the rainfall than we typically would, but it doesn’t appear like it hurt anything so far.”
Gipe says the extra moisture was also a win for his cattle, helping keep pastures in good shape throughout the growing season.
