Daylight savings time impact on agriculture

WICHITA FALLS, Texas (KAUZ) - Daylight saving time in March means that an hour is lost, and for ranchers, it can be hard for ranchers to chase the lost time.

“You have to bale the hay when it’s time for it to be baled not when you have time to bale it,” said rancher, Chuck Huff. “Downtime will eat you up. So when it’s broken it’s time to fix it now, not when you get around to it, it’s gotta be now.”

“If you have a delay and it’s planting time and then that soil gets too dry, then you can’t do a good job planting. You cannot count on the soil moisture for that seed to germinate, so it’s very important that when the conditions are right we have to be going cause it can change within a weeks time easily,” Wichita County Extension Agent David Graf said.

When a rancher falls behind on work, even for a week, the soil can change even pushing them further behind.

“Because you don’t know if you do that several times the number of acreages that you lost, that you could have been planting and then we get rain or something next week or the week after,” Graf said.

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