By Elise Hammond
Eric Brooks hops out of his red, dusty combine in battered blue jeans and a green trucker cap. The hulking machine rumbles as he gazes over his field. There’s just one strip of corn left here that needs to be harvested, but the job is far from over. There are 500 more acres of corn across Southeast Ohio that Brooks will have to take down with his equipment.
Brooks has been farming since he was 13, and has fields in Athens, Nelsonville and Meigs counties where he plants about 1,300 acres of corn, wheat and soybeans each year. He lives on the same farm in New Marshfield where he grew up, so he is no stranger to the struggles of farming in Ohio.
Now that the season is over, the numbers show the predictions were correct. In Ohio, corn for grain production dropped by more than 200 million bushels, and the total acres of corn harvested in the state dropped by more than 700,000 acres from 2018 to 2019,
according to the USDA.
But while the USDA’s forecast was true for most of the state, Brooks said Southeast Ohio got lucky.
“Those farmers are really suffering this year. A lot of them just didn’t get anything planted,” Brooks said. “This very may well be the garden spot of Ohio.”
Rory Lewandowski, an extension educator and crop production expert at the Agricultural Institute of Technology at Ohio State, said this year’s weather was challenging for Ohio farmers. He said about a million and a half acres of crops did not get planted this year and those that did, were planted late because of wet weather conditions.
“This was by far the worst conditions we’ve had,” Lewandowski said, adding that the state has had wet spring weather for the last three years.
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