EATON COUNTY, Mich. (WLNS) — Only two months ago, farmer Brett Roberts’ farm was dealing with too much water.
Now, he’s hoping for rain as soon as possible.
“We had a very dry planting season, which made it easy to put the crop in, but now we have to get the crop out of the ground and established,” Roberts explained.
While farmers are aware of the weather’s unpredictability, the dry season can impact everyday consumers too.
According to Theresa Sisung with the Michigan Farm Bureau, with bad crops or crop failures come rising prices for shoppers.
When local stores can only purchase crops in small amounts from farmers because of less than ideal weather, scarcity can become a problem.
Right now, Roberts said water is desperately needed. It’s literally a waiting game.
“Most of our plants right now are either just freshly emerged, or they haven’t emerged yet,” Roberts explained.
he went on to say that plants that haven’t yet emerged won’t sprout until the area gets a rain. The seeds are just waiting on precipitation.
In the meantime, Roberts has his fingers crossed.
“I mean wait and see, right?” he asked. “That’s all we can do. That’s what we do most of the time; we put a big gamble every single year, we take a lot of money, we plant a crop in the spring and then Mother Nature is going to take care of it from there on.”
He said that farmers just need to be ready to react when that rain falls.
