“It’s pretty rough,” farmer Jim Sugarek said Thursday morning when asked about the grain sorghum harvest this year.

“We’ve already lost a lot of maize due to sprouting,” he said.

Sugarek, who also manages the South Texas Implements John Deere dealership in Beeville, said not half the sorghum has been brought in yet and already the extended wet weather is taking a toll on what should have been an excellent crop this year.

Fortunately, the corn is a hardier crop and it can wait for a later harvest.

But the possibility exists that local farmers will end up combining grain in muddy fields.

“That’s never fun,” Sugarek said.

The same thing happened to local farmers in 2007. After a wet spring and good results in the fields, rains came to the coastal plains just at harvest time and sorghum heads sprouted several times in the field before farmers could get their equipment in and harvest the crop.

“If we can just get in there and get it done, we’ve still got a good crop out there,” Sugarek said.

Thursday the likelihood of getting in there and getting it done looked iffy at best. Tropical disturbance-caused rains started falling early Thursday and were expected to continue through the weekend.

“Man, isn’t this something?” said farmer Troy Berthold.

He said he harvested some of his sorghum on Wednesday and some of it had sprouted.

“We lost about 20 percent of it. It’s (the weather) just not giving us any time.”

“We had one of the best crops I’ve probably seen in my life.” Then two days and three nights of rain did its damage.

“It was really surprising what it yielded even after it sprouted,” Berthold said. “I don’t know how long this is going to last.”

“It’s a shame,” he said. After years of drought and other problems, farmers were wondering this year where they were going to put all the grain they had in their fields. Then the rains came and helped alleviate that problem.

Like Sugarek, Berthold had better hope for his corn crop this year.

“It looks okay. It’s going to weather a lot better. It has a cover.”

Berthold planted more corn than milo this year. Two-thirds of his crop was in corn. But he and others had high hopes this year for a good sorghum yield. Now, every time it rains and keeps the combines out of the fields another day, the price farmers can expect to get for their milo drops again.