CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Nueces County farmers are in a race against time to try and get crops out of the field and into grain silos as Hurricane Beryl threatens the Coastal Bend.
Harvesting machines were out in the fields picking sorghum at the same time that one truck after another was pulling into the Driscoll Grain Co-Op to unload tons of the cash crop.
Nueces County Ag agent Jamie Lopez said farmers need to get the grain into these silos before any rain from Beryl ruins their crop that's left in the field.
"Any additional rain that we get now another three, five or eight additional inches would just saturate the soil to such a point where we would probably not be able to get in there for weeks," Lopez said. "Any sorghum that's left out for that long we are at risk for having that sorghum start to sprout on us."
Nueces County is usually among the top two sorghum producers in the state. The crop represents tens of millions of dollars to our economy. That's why there's a rush to get the sorghum out of the fields.
Right now, the job is about 90 percent complete.
"We plant grain, cotton and corn; right now we're trying to harvest our grain before the storm hits and get it out of here to save it and make some money out of it," Frank Flores with Dugger Enterprises said.
Corn is another crop that needs to get picked before anymore rains hit or it too will be ruined.
If we get heavy downpours from Hurricane Beryl, cotton would also be ruined.
"If we do get rain like they're potentially predicting, five to eight inches, it would have a drastic impact on our cotton, it would definitely not be beneficial to it and in worst cases could be devastating," Lopez said.
Cotton is just weeks away from being harvested. Rain at this time of year would be catastrophic for this crop which right now looks like one of the best in years.