by Jimmy Carroll, reporter
OMAHA – The state of Nebraska experienced its 4th driest summer to date, affecting farmers and ranchers. The month of August was difficult for the cornhusker state with the Omaha metro area experiencing three inches below average for August and over ten inches below average for the year.
Bryon Shanahan lives on an acreage near Wahoo, and says his family farm suffered from the drought and hopes fall harvest is not greatly affected.
Shanahan said: “The hay is about half of what we should have gotten. The beans produced but they’re real small. Inside they didn’t produce. The corn’s short.”
Out here in Wahoo, Nebraska which is about an hour West of the metro, farmers say corn and soybeans were severely affected by the summer drought, which will lead to a difficult Fall harvest.
Nebraska City farmer Patrick Gress owns nearly twenty-four hundred acres and noticed his soybeans and fresh corn for the year barely survived.
“Corn was not affected that much that I can tell. There was not a lot of impact and the kernels did not recede at the end. It did dry the corn down fast. The soybeans went from 3 bean pods to 1 to 2 bean pods and some pods even dried up and shriveled up and dropped off.”
Across the state, yields are still small since crops are dying, and livestock don’t have alfalfa due to the lack of irrigation and weather.
