El Nino leaves dry soil: Spring planting begins early

Crop dusters have begun flying overhead and plumes of dust are beginning to appear on the western horizon as Whitman County farmers begin one of the earliest planting seasons in recent memory.

“It’s definitely unusual,” said Steve Van Vleet, Whitman County WSU extension agent. “We’re easily two to three weeks, or a month, ahead of schedule.”

Many are trying to get a crop in the ground early to try and catch whatever rain will fall during the upcoming growing season.

The El Nino weather system that staved off winter on the Palouse left little moisture behind for spring crops.

David Jones, soil conservationist with the Colfax office of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, said precipitation around the Colfax area over the winter has been about two inches below normal.

Jones recorded 7.17 inches over that time. Through Tuesday, February rainfall had totaled three-quarters of an inch, nearly one full inch below normal, said Jones.

Lee McGuire tracks precipitation for the NRCS at his Cashup home. He also regularly digs into the soil to determine how much precipitation is moistening subsoil.

McGuire said soil is usually moistened about 36 inches deep by this time. This year’s soil moisture has reached down only about 26 to 30 inches.

Jones said most of the precipitation fell after ground had frozen in December. Hitting the frozen ground meant that rain washed off fields into drainage ditches and went downstream instead of into the soil profile.

Van Vleet said he noticed a particularly dry spot on Rhod McIntosh’s farm south of Kamiak Butte. A portion of McIntosh’s ground has a low spot that annually pools as it collects runoff from surrounding hills.

Unlike the ponds on the site for the past 50 years, runoff in the low spot barely amounted to a puddle this year, McIntosh said.

For the last two years, spring planting has been pushed back because record snow hung on hilltops well into April.

If another dry spring follows this dry winter, Van Vleet said growers could have a new set of diseases to worry about. Root diseases like rhizoctonia worsen in dry weather systems, he noted.

Drier weather also provides excellent hatching conditions for grasshoppers and hessian flies, both of which lay their eggs in the ground during the winter.

Normal spring rains prevent the eggs of those pests from hatching and producing crop-devouring insects.

Van Vleet noted grasshoppers were bountiful last year because of the dry spring, but their numbers were initially kept down by the heavy snow layer that stayed on the ground well into spring.