The first time he climbed on a tractor back in the mid-1950s, Garry Daniels learned there’s more to the real thing than the toy ones. As he approached the end of a field, he wasn’t strong enough to turn the manual steering wheel. Front tires dug and kept the tractor going straight ahead. But, he did get it stopped before crashing into a hedge row.
Sixty years later, he’s still farming south of Humboldt. Things are much different.
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Garry Daniels shook a handful of chest-high soybean plants and smiled when no worms fell at his feet. That’s the cherry on top of a year that has been resplendent with good news.
About the only negative at this point is that corn borers and a little green worm are appearing in some soybean fields. Crop dusters acrobatically mark the beans that are infested.
“We’d thought about spraying, but so far we haven’t had a problem,” said Daniels, 70.
Wheat harvest produced good yields. Corn, on the verge of harvest, appears bound for good yields — although commodity prices are a concern — and soybeans may be on the cusp of setting records.
Farmers soon will know more about corn. Though a smidgen has been cut farmers are waiting for the weather to turn warm and sunny for the combines to start to roll.
Of a cautious nature, Daniels is not prepared to announce 2016 an unqualified success. He remembers other years when a good harvest seemed all but assured only to have nature intervene at the last minute and sour expectations.
Early August 1986: The inland hurricane roared through Allen County and left crop fields a maze of twisted plants and dashed hopes. July 2007: Almost unparalleled rainfall sent the Neosho River surging from its banks, in places sweeping corn and soybean plants from fields as if they had been cut with a sickle.
Looking back further, Daniels, who has farmed since his pre-teen years, recalls 1957 and 1967 being so wet the wheat harvest didn’t occur until fair time in August 1957, two months later than usual. Ten years later the fields were a sloppy mess.
This year is different; rain by and large has fallen at the right times and in the right amounts.
Even with the benefit of experience, this year Daniels is bordering on optimistic.
“This is a growing year and could be a real good one,” Daniels said, as he relaxed in his is office.
Though the worm problem does nag at him.
After checking the chest-high soybean plants on some of his best ground, a river bottom field south of where U.S. 169 snakes from Allen County to Neosho, and finding it absent of worms, he announced: “Let’s check the Monarch bottom.”
That field south of Monarch Cement’s original quarry holds better than 100 acres of soybeans. At its east edge is a buffer of Johnson grass, partly dead from spraying, the rest taller than any man. Next comes a strip of what Daniels calls pig weed that sneers at Roundup, the universally favored herbicide, and embraces low spots where water stands.
