Will continuing rains be beneficial or harmful to crops?

The wet winter and spring should mean great things for wheat yields throughout the Palouse and Inland Pacific Northwest, but the continuing rains are making it difficult for area farmers to get their spring crops planted.

“You can grow more (wheat) bushels on timely moisture than you can abundant moisture,” said Sam White, chief operating officer at the Pacific Northwest Farmers Cooperative. “You get too much it can actually, in the low grounds, start drowning out the crops and adversely affecting yields.”

While a break in the rain would be nice, White said farmers will still need June rain to get a boost of extra yields.

“The moisture is a good thing,” White said. “You just don’t want too much of it. There’s a fine line there I guess.”

Overall, Moscow received 21.95 inches of precipitation from Nov. 1 to April 30, surpassing the average of 17.31 inches during that time frame, according to Bryce Williams, a forecaster at the National Weather Service in Spokane. Pullman received 15.86 inches of precipitation from Nov. 1 to Monday, topping the average of 11.24 inches during the same period.

“Typically a dryland farmer doesn’t want to complain about any type of moisture he gets, whether it’s snow or rain,” White said. “The snow’s nice to recharge the soils and everything is fully recharged at this point and time.”

Still, too much of a good thing can be bad.

Tim Murray, WSU professor and extension plant pathologist, said while extra moisture has the potential to raise crop yields, if the soil is too wet for too long, waterlogging can occur, which is not beneficial for plants.

Excess moisture raises the potential for crop diseases, such as stripe rust, which thrives on wet conditions and can lower yields.