WATERLOGGED

MAT-SU — Someone can turn off the spigot.

Valley farmers are casting their eyes skyward, wondering if the rains will abate — at least long enough for them to get into their fields to weed and harvest.

There hasn’t been a stretch of dry days since early in the month, according to data gathered at the UAF Experiment Farm on Trunk Road and the Alaska Plant Materials Center off Bogenburg Loop.

For many Valley hay farmers, that means a first cutting of hay just hasn’t happened.

In the Butte, Teresa Weiland at Pioneer Farms watches the rain fall on the 30 acres of hay she cut earlier this month on a nice sunny day. While the forecast called for only a 20 percent chance of rain over the following few days (she keeps the National Weather Service number in her cell phone), the rains came, and kept coming, before she could get it or any other fields baled.

“A hundred and eighty acres and we don’t have a bale in,” Weiland said.

According to Suzan Benz, statistician with the Alaska office of the National Agricultural Statistics Service, about 45 percent of the Valley’s hay crop is baled, compared to about 70 percent average statewide. That average includes a good haying season in the Delta area, where about 90 percent of the first cutting is baled. On the Kenai Peninsula, it’s only about 13 percent.

Benz said farmers in some areas, like Lazy Mountain, were able to get a cutting baled during that early July window. In other places, the hay may have been too short because of the dry spring or too wet to bale when Mother Nature sent the sunshine.

Benz said normally about 95 percent of the state’s first cutting of hay is baled by late July.

It’s not just the hayland that is swamped, of course. It’s wreaking havoc with crops like strawberries.

At Glacier Valley Farm in the Springer system, Arthur Keyes is culling many of his jumbo-size strawberries. Puddles of rainwater are causing a high percentage of the berries to rot in the rows, despite Keyes’ efforts to counter the effects of the moisture with improved nutrient management.

“The yields are way down,” Keyes said. “It’s not going to be a bumper-crop year.”

He said the strawberries are handling the rain better than in past years, but all the nutrient management in the world can’t fight the standing water. Still, he’s encouraged by the firm, tasty berries.

“When we do get nice weather, I’m going to be ready,” he said.

While Keyes’ sweet corn and zucchini are also suffering from the lack of sunshine, many other vegetables are thriving despite the overcast skies. His onions and fennel are growing well, for example.

In the Butte, Paula Giauque of Gold Nugget Farms Inc. is seeing good yields. She said workers there are harvesting head, red, Romaine and green-leaf lettuce, red and green cabbage, collards, kale and broccoli for the wholesale market and stores, like Fred Meyer.

Most of those plants like the cool weather, and, “They’ve had all the water they wanted,” she said.

That’s not to say the rain isn’t giving her fits.

“The biggest problem is getting into the field to get things out,” Giauque said.

Including to fight the weeds; Gold Nugget Farms uses no herbicides.

“It’s all done with a hoe,” Giauque said.

While staff at the Alaska Plant Materials Center report some smut and ergot (types of detrimental fungus) on plots of grain growing there because of the wet season, Giaugue said she’s not seen disease problems in her vegetables.

In Sutton, Wes Bannon of Our Best Bannon Produce, said his potato crop is both free of late-season blight and promising to be “excellent.”

“They’re doing good in the rain,” Bannon said of his 38 acres of potatoes. “It’s the cleanest crop I’ve grown in the last 20 years.”

Bannon will start digging Yukon Gold potatoes about Aug. 16, with the crop shipping to restaurants and independent grocers, including Three Bears, Steve’s Food Boy and Cubby’s.

Benz, the NASS statistician, credits the good crops with the fact that while it has been wet for about a month, it has not been unduly cold like the summer of 2007.

“It’s not necessarily cold,” she said. “It’s just wet.”

According to the Alaska Crop-Weather weekly report from Monday, as of July 25, the number degree days (relative to a base of 50 degrees Fahrenheit) was 24 days below historic averages in Palmer and Talkeetna, and down 86 days in Sutton, but 97 above historic averages in Willow.

That hasn’t helped the haying at Ed and Brenda McCain’s Snowy River Ranch near Willow.

“It may be warm, but we can’t get four straight days,” Brenda McCain said. As is typical with farmers, the McCains cut their hay, let it set one day, ted (aerate) the hay the third day, then rake and bale it the fourth.

“It’s the rain that gets us,” McCain said. “It’s not the temperature. We’re in the same boat as everyone else with this.”

Valley farmers are used to taking Alaska weather as it comes.

“It makes you appreciate the good weather,” Keyes said.

For Weiland, whose family also owns Pioneer Equipment, the trouble bringing in the hay has a silver lining. Pioneer Equipment sells tedders, which fluff the hay for better drying, and a relatively new system, called a Harvest Tec Crop Saver, that adds a natural preservative to hay as it is baled to prevent molding.

“Those kinds of things are helping people, but you still can’t bale in the rain,” Weiland said.