Farmers face rarity, asking for rain to hold off as crops drown in floods

TEMPLE, Texas (KWTX) - Farmers have been praying for rain but some of them may have gotten more than they bargained for. And that much needed rain, became counterproductive.

Before the recent rounds of rain and hail, the crop for the cattle at the Newsom family farm in Temple would stand about 36 inches tall. But after being beat down, the crop can no longer stand on its own and has made a year’s worth of work useless.

“We were going to bail the hay, and it started raining so we couldn’t get into bail it. Then it ripened past the point that we could bail it, and then it kept on raining and now it’s flat on the ground,” says Charles Newsom.

Newsom has been growing grain for his cattle on a 65-acre slice of Temple, Texas heaven for almost a decade, and says he is experiencing a rarity in farming. Asking for the rain to hold off.

The damage from recent flooding and hail has some farmers at a standstill. For the Newsom’s, they can’t bring their cattle in to graze the area. Because if you were to turn them out into the field, the ground is so soft that the cows would turn the pasture to mush.

And because the pasture soil is sopping and the crops are frail, they can’t bring out the machinery to cut it down. So, they wait.

“I’ll turn the cows in on it maybe next month sometime and see if they can get anything out of it and then just plow it under, it’s basically a total loss,” Newsom explains.

Floyd Ingram with Bell County’s Texas A&M AgriLife Extension says plenty of other crops are in trouble too, like cotton and corn.

“Corn took a really big hit, knocked a lot of tassels out of the corn, tore up a lot of leaves, things like that,” Ingram says.

For now, while they wait to recover, they are taking a roll of the dice on their livelihoods.

“You don’t have to go to Vegas to gamble,” Newsom says with a laugh.

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