HARRISON, Ohio — Thanks to dry conditions and hot weather, it’s bad everywhere right now, said grain farmer Tim Hesselbrock.

“Rain has been very spotty,” he said. “You get a little bit, somebody else may get a little more, but it is not nearly enough to help out anything right now with the high temperatures we have and the hot wind. We’re having a tremendous amount of loss.”

Soybeans are half as tall as they should be by this time of year, said Hesselbrock, who is also vice president of the Butler County Farm Bureau. In some areas, he pointed out the plants look as if as if they are going to wilt and die.

“I hate to say it; probably, we’ll be lucky if we have a half a crop this year, and it could get worse fast,” he said. “You’ve got to have some height to get pods because they only put pods on at every node. You’ve got to have a fairly decent-sized soybean plant to get 50 bushels-to-the-acre beans ... Right now I’m not sure if they’re going to have any beans.”

Corn may be in worse shape than soybeans because corn grows by heat units and “we’re piling them up pretty fast,” Hesselbrock said. Some corn is tasseling and developing ears too early.

“We’ve got corn that is only four- and five-foot tall putting tassels out already and it is out of moisture and rolled up, so it’s not going to have much of an ear, if it has an ear at all,” Hesselbrock said. “The other corn that was planted much earlier has shot an ear and pollinated, but it is losing bushels every day, too.

“We’re looking at a situation where we’re going to take a pretty good hit this year. I don’t know how much you can afford to spend for seed and everything else next year without a crop this year.”

Many, but not all, farmers have crop insurance, he said. Those who do not may be looking for other jobs come spring.

Hesselbrock also experienced severe droughts in 1983 and 1988. A corn test plot yielded 256 bushels to the acre in 1982. In 1983 that plot yielded only 10 bushels to the acre – and much of the corn did not develop ears.

“That’s what we could be looking at across the country,”  Hesselbrock said. “If you hit a 40- to 50-bushel average across the country and they’re used to 160-bushel acreage average, it’s going to a big shortage. It is going to make it hard for everybody the next year to start farming again because of the amount of loss they’re going to take even though they’ve got crop insurance.”