Was out and about for a little bit today. Like most of Minnesota we’ve had a wet spring and first half of the summer and things just can’t seem to dry out before we get hit with more rain. Spring planting was late and then the floods came. Rivers and creeks out of their banks, prairie potholes turned into lakes.
This scene is very common, even now the 19th of July.
This creek has returned to it’s banks, but you can see clearly where the flooding was.
This pot hole is pretty much a loss I think The farmer has planted soy beans in it and they are up, but about three inches high. Unless we have a very late frost not much will come of this.
Lastly this is a corn field. The wet conditions have been hard on the corn, stunted growth, yellowing and various heights of corn tell the tale. The fields that do look good are ones that were in ground that does not flood and were planted before the flooding rains. Even those, however, are a couple weeks behind other parts of Minnesota I have seen.
Carver County seems to have taken the brunt of the excess moisture this year. A few roads are still closed due to flood damage to the road. A July 2nd article mentions that the state has sustained an estimated 32 million dollars of flood damage. 9.2 million, nearly 1/3 of the Minnesota total is in Carver County. http://www.kduz.com/2014/07/02/mn-flood-damage-estimatescarver-county-hit-hardest/