Soaked Lands Help N. Dakotans Escape Worst of Drought : ’87 Storm Disaster Turns Into a Blessing

It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, but she sure pulls some doozies on us.

Ask Roger Erickson. Almost a year ago, at dusk on July 21, a freak gully washer blew across his wheat and bean farm, dumping sheets of water and hail the size of mothballs. Seven inches of rain fell in a matter of hours, and in the next few days--at what is normally a dry time of year--down came another three inches.

Erickson’s harvest of navy and pinto beans and soybeans was cut nearly in half as the crops drowned in knee-high pools of standing water. Five weeks after the storm, it was still so wet in the fields that Erickson’s combine kept getting stuck in mud when he tried to cut his wheat.

A Turnaround Year

But the misfortunes of 1987 turned into a blessing for 1988. Erickson’s 1,400 acres were so thoroughly soaked that they have escaped the worst of this year’s crippling drought.

“I’ve got friends on the western part of the state who have nothing,” said Erickson, 42. “I feel lucky. ‘Bout all it is is luck.”

Nobody is talking about bumper crops here, and high temperatures and lack of spring and summer rains this year are expected to trim back yields somewhat for spring wheat, barley and other key crops.

Still, in the sad, brown desert that much of the nation’s heartland has begun to resemble, the small sliver of eastern North Dakota that suffered from last year’s drenching is now a green oasis--a testament to the fickleness of weather.

It is also a stark reminder that, despite all the advanced fertilizers, hybrid seeds and mechanization, modern agriculture can still be very much like crap shooting.

“They call us the garden spot,” Ray Gibbons, a clerk at the Agriculture Department’s extension office in nearby Hillsboro, said with a twinkle in his eyes. “They say everybody’s hurting but we’re not hurting particularly bad. That’s because we got a lot of good, praying Lutherans. Don’t let it out.”

Avoid Disaster Designation

Traill County, which bore the brunt of the storm damage, was declared a disaster area last year by Secretary of Agriculture Richard E. Lyng. That helped secure aid to ease the sting of crop losses. This year, so far, Traill and neighboring Steele County are the only two of 53 North Dakota counties not on the official drought disaster list--even though both have received less than half their normal precipitation.

In an average year, Traill County farms get about 19 inches of moisture from rain and snow. Last July’s storm dumped more than half of that in just a few days, destroying much of the sugar beet and bean crops. But Loren Hamre, the federal extension agent in the county, said it left the subsoil soggy enough to help crops off to a good start in the spring, when the rains failed and farmers nearby were having trouble raising even stubbles of wheat.

“When they (local farmers) looked around last year and saw all their neighbors doing really well, they were discouraged,” said Danny Pinske, who manages the Farmer’s Elevator Co-op in Portland. “This year they’re doing better than others but it’s still dry. They’re talking only 20 to 30% reductions, which sounds good right now.”

Beans in Good Shape

Despite 100-degree temperatures earlier this month, Erickson says his bean crop looks in “very good” shape. The heat has scorched the wheat crop and yields could be down by 50%, but the stands are still green and hip-high--the way they should be--instead of brown and scraggly as in harder-hit areas.

Like Erickson, Richard Fugleberg figures he lost somewhere between 10% and 30% of his crops in last summer’s storm, which blew the roof off his cattle shed, knocked over a windmill and pelted his 900-acre property with 10 inches of rain and hail.

“That 10 inches helped us get the crop started this spring,” Fugleberg said. “We were feeling sorry for ourselves, but now we get out and look at our neighbors to the south and west of us. I wouldn’t trade places with them.”