“Knee High By the Fourth of July” is an old adage used by corn farmers to measure their success by Independence Day.
Dave Wilfert of Wilfert Farms near Shoto tells us the sweet corn crop is ahead of schedule.
“Actually, we’ll probably be starting on sweetcorn in about a week. We were out Wednesday in some fields for sweetcorn and fields for grain and they were about 4-and-a-half to 5-feet tall. So, it’s looking good otherwise.”
But, one concern that the local grower has is overall soil moisture. While some locations saw 2, 3 and 4 inches of rain this week, Wilfert said, unfortunately, they didn’t see that much, an inch & a quarter.
“Now, normally we would think of an inch and a quarter as a pretty nice rain and it definitely was. And it wasn’t a downpour so it did soak in. But, we have to look back at what the moisture was before we started. This year we’ve experienced unusually low subsoil moisture so that’s going to play in all along as we go.”
He says they’re still looking at a water deficit, so it’s going to be an interesting year because they’re basically, as he likes to say, “going hand to mouth” for the precipitation on their farm.
