The Rio Grande Valley, Texas has dealt with heavy floods four four straight years now, and recent heavy rains caused problems for farmers, who are right in the middle of growing season.
Recent storms in the southern parts of Texas prove that Mother Nature is not operating on our time!
“We just had, you know, ten inches across the whole entire valley,” Texas farmer Bryce Wilde states. “We’re 50 percent through with the grain harvest. We’ve got cotton, sewn field, and sugar cane. So, it came at a really hard time.”
Also, the floods have been lingering longer than expected.
“We’re having to drain the entire valley at once, which is hard. So, when you have a really difficult and outdated drainage system, it’s hard,” Wilde explains.
He says that water evaded the drainage districts, came out into the outskirts of land and stayed a while. That is creating new concerns about what the future holds for the season.
According to Wilde, “It’s too early to say. We’re still in hurricane season. We’ve got a lot more of growing season. Cotton harvest is about to start up and so, any little rain event at this point could be more damaging because everything is so saturated already.”
Now, even with the flooding, many of these crops could still be saved. In fact, there is hope that this will be a very good year for the ag community in this part of the country.
“Coming out of 2019, coming out of 2020, we’re really excited to make a beautiful crop, and so, we pushed real hard to get what we could out of the fields. We still have potential to make great crops, great yields, coming in these next couple of months,” he notes.
Wilde also states that the ag community in the Rio Grande Valley is setting itself up for success!
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