Smoke slows some crops, boosts wheat

Smoke wafting to Hancock County from Canadian wildfires this summer slowed crops' growth, but appears to have boosted the wheat harvest, farmers said this week. "It definitely delayed the (soybeans) because I really thought that we would have been in the fields (harvesting). We should have been in the fields here in the past week on our earlier beans," McComb area farmer Anthony Stateler said. "But until it kind of goes through the combine and it goes across the scales, I don't know that we're really going to know what the true impact was." Neil Clark, who farms in north and eastern Hancock County and into Wood County, believes his bean and corn harvests have been delayed by the wildfire smoke months ago. "Something is going on. The corn is not ripening up as fast as it should have," Clark said. "We should have corn that should be fairly dry by now, but it's wet." The wildfire smoke "didn't help matters, that's for sure. It didn't help people, so you can imagine it didn't help Mother Nature either," he said. Michael Stacy, who farms in northern Hancock County, said the harvest of his soybeans appears to have been delayed by wildfire smoke. However, Stacy and Stateler believe the smoke caused a pleasant surprise at wheat harvest earlier this year. "Those two or three weeks there in June, I thought it was so dry that it was going to really hurt the yield on the plant," Stacy said. But the harsh weather's impact was muffled by the smoke. The wheat "didn't get as much heat stress because we didn't get direct sunlight to it," he said. "Maybe that had an effect on the plant enough that it helped it produce a bountiful yield." The well-timed smoke delay in the crop's development appears to have been just what the wheat doctor would have ordered. "The smoke maybe retarded the growth of the plant, the maturity of the plant, somewhat," Stacy said. "It actually enhanced it and it actually produced a wonderful crop." Wildfire smoke had another silver lining for wheat. It brought with it carbon, which fortified the crop, Stateler said. "Yes, we had all of this smoke from Canada, but our plants really like carbon," he said. "So if you look at Hancock County and the area around, our wheat was excellent, which leads us to believe that the plants were soaking up as much carbon as they could because we had a more carbon-rich environment for the plant."