DAVISON (DTV) – (6/4/2025) – Farmers in Michigan rely on the rain to keep their crops nice and healthy. But when the rain becomes too much it can cause problems for the farmers. The Davison area usually gets about 11 inches of rain every summer.
This past summer Davison got about 6 inches of extra rain. The problem is that most of that extra rain happened between August and November right in the middle of the harvesting months. And for farm owners like Bill Hunt this could be disastrous. Hunt says “The weather started crazy last August, and never really stopped. It rained all pretty well in August. September, October. November. So our harvest was delayed almost two months.”
The timing of this extra rain caused several problems for the farmers. The main problem was flooding in the fields. These floods killed some crops and muddied up the soil. The summer heat was not enough to evaporate the excess water, leading to even more damage and delayed the harvest.
This Harvest delay can really affect these local farms and markets, and the effects of the rain and drought make it hard for crops to grow leaving these farms on a time crunch to harvest and sell before their winter due date.
“The Market right now is this low as it’s been in the last – it’s a shortage of crops because they’re flooded.” Hunt said.
With unexpected conditions come unexpected results and Hunt Farms has seen the damage and impact it had on their growing crops.
“The worst rain we had — 2 to 4%” he said, “We lost some corn – So yes, it was a tough year for us.”
In Michigan, the Weather can change in an instant, and with crops adjusting could be the key to survival.
“There’s nothing we can add to this fertilizer, to the seed or to anything like that. We can buy better genetics that can handle more adversities, which we tend to try to buy anyhow because in Michigan we can have a multitude of weathers all in the same 3 or 4-month period” Hunt commented.
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