Most took advantage of the Labor Day holiday by trying to forget about what's going on at work. But if you're a farmer in Wisconsin, your mind was probably contemplating when you can get back out to your fields and get back to the job at hand. Unfortunately the last couple of weeks of wet weather could set farmers back, from their typically scheduled harvest.
In the past 15 days southern and central Wisconsin was pounded by as much as six to ten inches of rain, and that was just part of the headache for farmers.
"You hear of hail and you hear of crops being damaged besides the tornadoes and the torrential rains so I guess a whole array of things are taking place down there. That wasn't good at all," says Mark Petersen of Petersen Dairy located in Grand Chute.
At Petersen Dairy they're fairing much better than the farmers down south did following last week’s storms. But the concern over wet fields that are still present today, is a cause of some worry.
"We're getting really close to our corn harvest, within a week. And the soy beans are right after that. So if it stops raining right now and the weather straightens out it might not be a big problem," adds Petersen.
The problem is though that Petersen says alfalfa, corn, and soy beans are all supposed to be harvested within the next couple of weeks. But most farmers know it's just too wet out across central and southern Wisconsin right now, to get the job done.
"We need dry weather now and the heat is a good thing. It's going to get our crops ripe so we gotta watch the wet," says Petersen.
And as strange as it sounds, once you get north of Brown County many farmers are dealing with fields that are abnormally dry for this time of the year right now, which has turned this season’s potential harvest into a tale of too much rain and just not enough of it, depending on where you live in Wisconsin.
