Since two heavy snowstorms hit the area early this winter, Ogle County farmers have been hoping for more moisture to no avail, Ogle County Farm Bureau Manager Ron Kern said Jan. 29.

Kern said those snowstorms yielded a vital 2-2.5 inches of moisture that was able to be soaked up by fields before the ground froze. A dry and extremely cold January hasn’t been ideal for Ogle County farmers, and has landed the area on drought maps, Kern said.

“With the cold spell we’ve seen recently and no more snow, we’re seeing the ground freeze up,” Kern said. “Any rain right now wouldn’t help with the ground being so frozen. If we could get more snow heading into a late March thaw, that may help us. For the past three years, we’ve been living on borrowed time with moisture. We’ve just been lucky getting rain when we absolutely had to have it. And we can’t keep living like that.”

The impact of recent extreme cold on farm ground will depend on how far down the frost line goes, Kern said. He’s hoping for a good thaw in the spring to allow moisture to get into the subsoil, which has been short on moisture in the area “for a long time.”

While row crop farmers in Ogle County have been assessing the weather as spring draws closer, area livestock farmers have been out in the elements.

“This cold weather is hard on livestock, and farmers, who are trying to keep water from freezing,” Kern said. “If they have confinement, they’re trying to make sure all of the generators, heat and fans and everything else are running. If anything breaks down this time of year, it’s just a miserable existence.”

This time of year for Ogle County row crop farmers involves pricing grain to move as spring approaches, and pricing, purchase and delivery of inputs like fertilizer, fuel and seed for the approaching season.

“Fuel is kind of a shining star among inputs right now with its reasonable price,” Kern said. “Prices on things like fertilizer and seed are going back up.”

Kern said the current top two issues in the farming industry are the federal tariff situation’s impact on commodity exports, and the need for a new federal Farm Bill.

Amid The White House’s tariffs, Ogle County farmers have seen the impacts of Argentina and Brazil selling more soybeans to China, which previously imported more beans from the U.S. South America has overtaken the U.S. as the top global exporter of soybeans, leaving American farmers with lower prices and uncertainty where soybeans will end up.

The U.S. has started to sell more soybeans to other countries that previously imported from Argentina and Brazil, but the China gap hasn’t been made up.

The federal government has initiated “some” subsidy programs for soybean farmers impacted by tariffs, but the situation is still not ideal, Kern said.

“The number is nowhere near what they’d have if there was a robust export market,” Kern said. “It’s more or less like throwing someone a breathing tube. If you have to sit there and breathe through a tube for the rest of your life, it’s a miserable existence. We just need to understand it’s a global market and we need to be a part of it. Any time you have prices like there are and you can get anything at all to help pay the bills, nobody is going to say no. But that’s not what we want.”

The current Farm Bill, passed in 2018, has been extended for a year three times. The federal Farm Bill allocates funding for crop insurance, disaster assistance and conservation programs for farmers.

“The Farm Bill work recently has just been a bunch of sword rattling in Washington, D.C.,” Kern said, “I don’t really have optimism for progress at the moment for something in the near future. It’s been extended for three years now. It’s time to do something. It’s frustrating. You can only kick the can down the road so far before you get to the end of the road. They need to modernize it. Agriculture is constantly changing and the Farm Bill needs to reflect that and its programs need to keep up with that.”

With spring on its way, Kern and Ogle County farmers find themselves doing something they’ve done for the past three years: Praying for moisture.

“Give me some relatively normal moisture and some normal weather come April,” Kern said. “And we will be back out into the fields and ready to go for another year.”