Dick and Joe Sutherland have a trick or two of their own when it comes to combating Mother Nature. Stuck in a persistent heat wave, the Sutherlands tap into the nearby Neosho River to irrigate at least 300 of the 2,800 acres they farm southwest of town.
“We can put on the equivalent of 2 inches of rain during a two-day cycle” with two giant sprinklers that creep in a circular pattern through their fields of corn and soybeans.
“That’s important when the corn’s making,” Dick Sutherland said in farmspeak for the corn putting on ears. “Usually, we have to irrigate corn twice,” and then turn to soybeans when ears are on the cusp of maturity.
“Beans can hold on quite a while, even when it’s hot and dry,” he added.
The Sutherlands have irrigated their fields for quite some time. Their grandfather, Ollie Sutherland, got a permit to take water from the river in the late 1930s.
Then, and for many years afterward, the water was applied in a flood system, which had it pumped from the river and transported through ditches and pipes. That method depended on having fields correctly laid out and the ground worked just right so water would flow to where it was needed.
In 1992, not long before they shut down the longtime Sutherland Dairy, the Sutherlands purchased the first of two long sprinkler systems.
The Sutherlands view irrigation as “our insurance policy,” they said, against the whims of nature.
Occasionally is a year when rains come timely enough that the diesel-fired pumps never go on. Last year, the sprinkler cycled through cornfields just once.
The Sutherlands’ permit from the state — none are issued for direct irrigation along the Neosho River nowadays — gives them rights to draw up to 300 acre of feet of water from the river. If full extent of the permit were exercised, crops on the 300 acres theoretically could benefit from six two-inch rains.
“We’d never use that much,” unless long-term drought conditions were exacerbated to extreme heat conditions.
In western Kansas, where the Ogallala Aquifer is tapped relentlessly, irrigation by sprinkler system is a way of life. From the air, the circles of green are identifiable as those of irrigated fields.
Here, irrigation of any sort is out of the ordinary. Except for the Sutherlands, only Dick Works, west of Humboldt, and Jack McFadden, west of Iola, in Allen County depend on the Neosho to keep crops adequately hydrated.
Irrigation also permits the Sutherlands to increase by about 30 percent the number of seeds they plant per acre, which elevates yields.
“We plant 32,000 seeds per acre (in irrigated corn), which gives us 200-bushel (per acre) yields most years,” Sutherland said, while unirrigated fields have 25,000 to 26,000 seeds and substantially lesser yields. “Beans usually make 60 to 70 bushels” an acre where irrigation is a feature.
THE SUTHERLANDS and essentially every other farmer in the area whizzed through the wheat harvest.
“It was fast,” Sutherland said. “I remember lots of times cutting wheat around the Fourth of July.
Yields were good, with the Sutherlands’ running from the high 30s to low 40s bushels per acre.
He noticed some white heads when the wheat was maturing, likely from a late freeze, Sutherland said. And some wheat didn’t yield quite as high as it appeared it might, but “40 bushels is pretty good for southeast Kansas,” he allowed, “and really looks good if you don’t raise anything else” on dryland crops of corn and beans.
Wheat sold for more than $7 a bushel through most of the harvest, but at the end of this week had fallen to about $6.50, as the grain continued to flow into markets.
