Cal and Joanne Dalton were planning a harvest party.

As they prepared their farm near Pardeeville for Friday night's festivities with the North Scott 4-H Club, of which Joanne is general leader, the irony wasn't lost on either of them that the occasion they planned to celebrate - the fall harvest - isn't going so well for them, or for many area farmers.

Cal was spending Friday afternoon getting wagons ready to take the 4-H youths on a hayride. He'd much rather have been in the field bringing in his corn and soybeans, but the ground and the grain were soaking wet from the previous evening's rains.

Harvest, he said, "is very, very slow. There's little, if anything, that we can do."

He's harvested maybe 150 acres of corn so far and has 1,100 acres still in the field. And the soybeans should all be in by now, but he's brought in only about 100 acres, with 150 to go.

The Daltons are far, far from alone in their worry and frustration.

Columbia County Extension Agriculture Agent Joe Bollman said farmers' problems started long before the recent wet weather.

"This entire growing season has gone against farmers," he said. "It was cool all summer long. We didn't get any moisture in August or September. September was the only warm month we had, and the crops can't catch up in their growth with just one warm month."

It's the wet weather now, however, that's keeping the crops in the field.

According to this week's Wisconsin crop progress report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Statistics Service, just 9 percent of the state's corn crop had been combined for grain, and 91 percent had been cut for silage. The soybean harvest was reported at 25 percent complete, an increase of 11 percentage points from the previous week, but still far behind what it should be.

Bollman said the soybean harvest should nearly be complete and the corn harvest should be about halfway done.

Among the Columbia County farmers that Bollman talks to, "there's a lot of nervousness about getting the crops off the fields."

It's not just that the ground is too sodden to maneuver farm machinery.

The grain itself also is too moist and requires extra drying, which costs time and energy once it's harvested.

Cal Dalton said corn ought to be about 20 percent moisture; his is between 28 percent and 30 percent moisture.

Bollman said weather forecasts for next week bode well for farmers. For the Portage area, the National Weather Service is predicting sunny or partly cloudy days from Monday through Friday, with maybe a 20 percent chance of rain or snow Tuesday night into Wednesday.

"A good dry spell for five or six days should help a lot," he said. "And farmers these days have a lot of big equipment, so they can harvest more grain at one time."

But, like many of his neighbors, Cal Dalton plans to work well into the night whenever the weather is conducive to harvesting.

That's why drivers are cautioned, at this time of year, to watch out for farm machinery traveling slowly on roads, at all hours, Bollman said.

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