Ron Wing parked his tractor last week. It was way too wet to hay.

A retired farmer, Wing cuts about 100 acres in Industry twice each summer. He sells some and feeds some to his son’s cattle.

“It’s the worst I’ve ever seen,” Wing said Friday. “The second crop is ready to cut and the first one isn’t in yet.”

With fields “much wetter now than when the snow melted,” he said he’d need a solid week of dry weather before he could go back out. That wasn’t in the forecast.

“Hay is just a terrible story,” said Gary Raymond, Kennebec and Franklin counties executive director of the Farm Service Agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

July already saw more rain than normal. The first seven days of August brought more than the state averages in the whole month, according to the National Weather Service.

The Portland jetport had already measured 3.88 inches of rain, meteorologist Steve Capriola said. The typical amount for that time: 0.7 inches. Average for all of August: 3.05.

Capriola said Saturday might dry out but Sunday called for more showers and thunderstorms.

The longer hay stays in the ground uncut, the more it starts to lose nutrients and get “stemmy,” Raymond said. Many farmers cut once, twice or even four times in a summer. Four isn’t going to happen this year, he said.

To even think about haying in square bales, farmers need two to three days of nice weather so the hay can dry out, he said. Farmers who use vacuum-sealed wraps need less time to dry, but that option is also more expensive.

Go in too early and there’s the potential for mold and rutting up fields.

“The second crop should be a large crop if they can get to it,” Raymond said.

Last year, Maine harvested 261,000 tons of hay off 149,000 acres, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service.

Corn, potatoes, blueberries

The rain is also causing other agricultural problems. Stan Millay, executive director of the Maine Milk Commission, said farmers usually empty their manure pits, often big concrete storage areas, after haying. They use the waste to fertilize the next hay crop. With all this rain, and nowhere to put the manure, those pits are getting full.

Corn is looking OK, but Raymond said he’s keeping an eye on places such as Fryeburg, Canton and Rumford for potential blight in the potato crop.

“You can spray for blight, but that doesn’t help if it washes off the next day,” he said. The disease gets into the tops of the plants and kills them, and you wouldn’t always know just by the looks of them. “That is a disaster that could be coming.”

Patricia Kontur, director of programs at the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine, said while pick-your-own operations are open, some large berry farms are having a hard time packaging wet berries, which swell and become more delicate.

The season had been predicted to be average to good. All of the rain “doesn’t bode well,” she said. Maine harvests more than 70 million pounds of wild blueberries each year.

The answering machine at a local blueberry operation declared they were open for business Friday but warned, “conditions are ridiculously wet” and to bring good footwear.