By Rhonda Garrison
South Carolina farmers continue to assess damages and tabulate losses, but also continue to look for crops that can be salvaged after the floods of early October, followed by weeks of rain. Calhoun County’s Clemson Extension Agent, Charles Davis says while cotton and peanuts are all but done, the soybean crop is really a tale of two crops:
“the early crop…Group 5’s and Group 6’s were ready to harvest when the rains came, and they’ve been soaked, and re-soaked, and soaked again, and the quality of those beans is pretty bad. We’ve been able to harvest some, and market some at a very big discount because of quality problems.
The later beans, the 7’s and 8’s and they didn’t look terribly great but they weren’t as bad as the 5’s, so we’re going to have to wait and see how they come out of the combine on those. But, they’re all being discounted, there’s damage in all of them.”
Farming is said to be the profession of eternal optimism, and it’s going to take a true optimist to get back into the field come spring 2016:
“It’s no doubt about it. I’ve had 85 year old farmers that have been farming since they were 10 years old tell me they’ve never seen anything like this, and pretty sure they’ll not see it again. But, bottom line is, we have disaster years, it’s just odd for us to have a drought disaster and a flood disaster in a 6-month period of each other, that’s just extremely unusual.
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