Alex Nabaum
Buoyed by high prices and fatter margins, upbeat farmers hope to get crops off to a smart start.
Eric Doolittle spent the winter plotting to make the next eight weeks as painless as possible. But even he knows the crop plans his farm team put together might need to be shelved and reworked at least once this spring.
“You think it’s going to run like clockwork, and then Mother Nature throws you a curveball,” says Doolittle, who grows corn and soybeans near Williams, Iowa. “It might rain here and 10 miles away it didn’t rain a drop, so you have to revamp and retool your plans. The ability to ‘make it up as you go’ is real because it can get really chaotic, really fast.”