A season with more bad choices than usual

My favorite cartoonist, Joe Martin, draws a daily strip called "Mr. Boffo."

Boffo is a kind of an everyman who Martin places in all manner of situations, from prehistoric times to the space age and in all types of peril and predicaments. The humor in Boffo can be, well, subtle.

Perhaps my favorite one shows Boffo strapped in a hulking electric chair, and in each hand he holds a piece of white bread.

The caption: "Making the best of a bad situation."

In other words, the best Boffo can do at this point is make toast.

Which brings me to this cropping season in the American South.

With all the rain in April and/or May (depending on where you are), this season has started in a miserable fashion. The wheat crop (see the item below) has suffered terrible losses in yield, quality and test weight. We reported more comments about that in this week's AgFax: Southern Grain report, plus carried numerous advisories in the Worth Downloading section on our home page.

Beyond the wheat, many growers were unable to make fertilizer and herbicide applications on corn until weeks after they were due. Soybeans and cotton were planted late and/or replanted multiple times. People in the field are telling us about soybean farmers who have replanted some spots 2 and even 3 times. Cotton and rice planting have been delayed so long that growers finally switched acreage to soybeans where they could. And much of the South's peanut crop will be planted late enough that it will take an extremely warm fall to carry it to full maturity.

Which brings us back to Mr. Boffo holding that bread and hoping for toast when the voltage hits.

This is one of those years when we're trying to make the best of a bad situation, which I'm hearing almost universally from farmers and the people who advise them.

In many cases this year there have been no "right" or "best" decisions, only varying degrees of bad choices, whether you're dealing with replanting, herbicide drift on rice or Valor injury on peanuts. Every choice is bad, but some are worse than others.

A Mississippi consultant told me about attending a social function over the weekend where he came in contact with a cross-section of Delta farmers -- cotton, rice, grain, Baptists, Catholics, even a sprinkling of Ole Miss graduates. It was the kind of gathering that people who run corporate focus groups should attend if they actually want to know what farmers think.

When they talked about the way this season has unraveled, the consultant realized that nearly every farmer in the crowd at one time or another said, "I'll be glad when this SOB (or words to that effect) is over."

"You always hear that, but it tends to be as you approach harvest or maybe in the middle of the season when they've suddenly got to throw a bunch of money at insects or irrigation," the consultant observed. "But this is the earliest I've ever heard so many people say it so much."

We've been hearing the same thing.There are plenty of bad situations to go around and, unfortuately, ample opportunities -- like Boffo -- to make toast.

-- Owen Taylor