Repated rains eliminated irrigation from summer slate

by Nathan Arneal
Published 10/8/25

If you had a local farmer draw up a rain schedule for the summer, he couldn’t have done much better than what Mother Nature delivered in 2025.

Most area pivots sat idle all summer long as regular rains made irrigation unnecessary.

From May to September of this year, the North Bend area received 29.35 inches of rain, almost 10 inches more than the normal 19.44.
The rains seemed to come at regular intervals, practically eliminating the need for irrigation.

“(The rains) were just really timely,” Kurt Dunker said. “They were nice amounts, too. It wasn’t a big downpour all at once. It was spread out evenly, so we got to take advantage of all of it.”

The farmers interviewed for this story farm ground from northern Saunders County north through North Bend up to the Webster and Ridgley area.

One said he ran a pivot one time on one bean field right after it was planted. Another ran a few pivots once to incorporate and activate herbicide. A pass or two was made on some sandy ground.

Otherwise, the pivots sat idle all summer.

“There’s a lot of these pivots that didn’t make one circle,” Chad Ruzicka said.

A couple still employ gravity irrigation in some spots, which was equally unused. Maynard Flamme never even put his pipe out. Bruce Williams did, but then he picked it up without ever running the pump.

“It was good exercise,” Williams joked. “Beautiful days in the nice summer heat.”

The wettest month of the 2025 summer was July, which is normally the driest. The 7.86 inches of July rain is more that double the normal amount. In all, North Bend got at least a quarter inch of rain on 10 occasions in July. Rains of at least an inch fell on July 7, 10, 15 and 20 with another half inch on the 29th. The biggest rain was 1.62 inches on July 20. The heaviest rain of the summer was 2.63 inches on June 3.
Williams, who farms mostly in northern Saunders County, said the rain was regular enough that he never got to the point where he even considered irrigating.

“We weren’t even close this year, actually,” he said.

That didn’t mean farmers could take off on vacation or anything. From experience, they knew the spigot could shut off at any time and they’d be right back to irrigating. The threat was always there.

“It was pretty much wait around because we thought we’d have to irrigate,” Flamme said. “We did a lot of odd jobs around the farm to pass the time. It was like, we could go somewhere, but we might have to irrigate.”

Ruzicka said lack of irrigating made time for other tasks.

“We got our corn hauled probably in record time,” he said. “We were home a lot earlier every night, I know that.”

The regular rain wasn’t without drawbacks.

“There are spots that are going to suffer because it was too wet,” Dunker said.

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