Wet Weather Delays Harvest From Midwest To South

BECKY BOHRER

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Hartwell Huddleston returned the extra combine he bought to help harvest what looked to be one of his best soybean crops ever.

After two months with little letup in rain, he figures he got five days' of work out of it, and one was spent just looking for dry ground to cut. And the quality of some of the crop he did bring in from his northwest Mississippi fields was so rough, an elevator refused truckloads.

"We've had a lot of rainy years, but this one puts those to shame," said Huddleston, who also sells crop insurance. "If a person's a farmer you start to think, 'Where am I going to sleep? How am I going to feed my children?'"

Late-season rains have delayed harvest from the Great Plains to the Deep South, frustrating farmers and raising questions about whether some in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf region would be able to stay in business after disastrous back-to-back years.

The longer the remaining U.S. cotton, corn and soybean crops stay out, the greater the potential for consumers to feel the effects and face slightly higher prices for products ranging from sodas to tofu to meat, said Chad Hart, an extension economist at Iowa State University.