Rains return; more in forecast throughout area

Posted: Monday, May 25, 2009 9:04 pm
By: John Brannon Messenger Staff Reporter

By JOHN BRANNON
Messenger Staff Reporter
Over the weekend, Tim Fox’s farm near Obion got hammered again by rain and more rain, but he seems to be taking it all in stride.
“It’s going to set us back three or four days, but we’ll get through it somehow,” he said with an upbeat tone. “We didn’t get hurt real bad down on this end of the county. We wound up with about an inch of rain. We’ll be out of the fields until the middle of the week.”
Fox, 51, owner of FoxHall Farms at Obion, was featured in a Messenger story last week about the effects of recent higher-than-usual rainfall. The story and photo were picked up by The Associated Press and broadcast statewide.
FoxHall Farms annually produces about 650 acres of corn and 2,100 acres of soybeans.
Wednesday, after almost two weeks of down time because of weather, Fox and his crew were able to return to the fields to do damage control. They were able to get four good days in the field before this last round of rain.
“We had planted 450 acres in corn,” he said. “(Since Wednes-day) we have replanted 200 acres and we’ve abandoned 40 acres.”

Abandoned?
“Right. We’re just not going to plant it back in corn. We’re going to switch over to (planting) soybeans.”
While Obion County was relatively fortunate to get only about an inch of rain, areas south of the county were harder hit.
Douglas Vogelsang, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office at Memphis, said early today that over the weekend Dyer County received 5.43 inches in a 24-hour period. “Most of it came in a three or four-hour period,” he said. “Torrential rain.”
The scenario? A “really warm” and moist and unstable air mass. And it’s not over yet, according to Vogelsang.
“It looks like another round of showers and thunderstors today but not with the severity we saw over the weekend,” he said.
He noted the thunderstorms that went through were slow-moving and narrow-banded. Some isolated locations got three to four inches; other areas, less than an inch. “Dyersburg got over five inches but other areas didn’t get a whole bunch. You could have gone 20 miles away and not got a lot,” he said.
Tim Smith, director of the Obion County office of the University of Tennessee Extension Service, could not be reached for comment.
Published in The Messenger 5.25.09