The remnants of Hurricane Idalia came and went in a hurry through South then North Carolina Wednesday into Thursday morning, and for the most part may have done more good than harm. Bayer technical agronomist Zach Webb has been surveying and says Marion County, South Carolina may have taken the brunt of it.
Marion County was the worst. We have seen some pictures and I talked to guys down there who had corn in the field and was blown down and some pretty bad at some places down there. They thought they got anywhere from five or six inches up to 16 inches of rain in some places down there. It was real spotty on the accumulations. But the corn kind of took it on the chin in those areas down there. And the cotton is tangled up and blown down. The cotton wasn’t opening yet so it’s really not going to be that bad. It will stand back up in time.
Further inland South Carolina seems to have fared well.
The guys I’ve talked to said well, you know, we’ve got about a third of our corn crop harvested and our corn really held up pretty good. The winds weren’t that bad for us. They’re probably about 30 miles further inland. And so it didn’t take a lot of distance to make a lot of difference in how the wind affected the crops.
Webb tells me there are some reports of blown over corn.
It’s real spotty, Mike. Where its, bad, it’s real bad. But then you don’t go too far away from it and it seemed not to be quite as detrimental and blown down quite as bad. I talked to my growers in the southern part of the state to see what they were seeing and one was in a bad spot. He was close to Marion County. He’s actually I think he might be in Orangeburg County, I believe.
Southeastern North Carolina farms seem to be fairly unscathed.
They got a fair amount of water I mean, you know I live really close to Wilson, NC. In my gauge I had two inches. So we didn’t get hammered by any stretch but the further toward the coast you went, toward Wilmington they obviously had more rain. And I can see those guys down there got 6 or 7 inches probably.
Webb says overall Idalia may have been a blessing in disguise.
It’s bad. But there’s like say have you been laying in there little ways and you move up north a little bit. And the guys are like, Yeah, we got some wind but our coins holding up pretty good. Caught and tangled up a little bit. The soybeans pretty much double taping the soybeans because they’ve been water anyway. And I’ll be honest with you, Mike, for the North Carolina guys. And for South Carolina. This was probably more beneficial than it was detrimental. It helped gave us we need water and finished cotton out with this being really need water loggers on the field parsing 140 days but other than that it was a good thing for us