GOSHEN — Though the summer drought is a memory for many people in Elkhart County, the view from the cabs of combines running across the county show the effects are still around.

“It’s been a real weird year, with the heat and the bugs,” said John Kirkdorffer of Brookview Farms, driving a combine through a corn field southwest of Goshen.

The gaps in irrigation in that field were easy to spot: The corn height dropped off significantly over the space of a few feet.

As Kirkdorffer harvested grain to feed to the farm’s hogs, he rolled through patches of large weeds in the corn, pointing out that the herbicide that was supposed to kill those weeds is activated by rain. As in providing water to crops, irrigation is really a second-rate substitute for rain.

According to the National Weather Service, the Goshen area remains more than seven inches below normal precipitation so far this year.

In a tractor at the end of the field, Kirkdorffer’s nephew, Cameron Riley — the fourth generation on the farm — said so far their yields were down due to the summer drought. “We lost a pretty decent amount,” he said. “Normally, 180 (bushels of corn per acre) is pretty low.” So far this year, they’ve been getting between 140 and 170 bushels an acre on their irrigated land.

The summer drought was especially hard on corn, leaving some not worth harvesting. Instead, it was chopped up and preserved in a process called ensilage, which turns it into feed, or silage.

Robert Kelly, livestock educator with the Purdue Cooperative Extension in Elkhart County, said, “A lot of our corn crop was turned into silage.”

Jeff Burbrink, extension horticulture educator, said, “The folks that were harvesting silage from some of these drought-damaged fields, the books were all saying you could get five or six tons per acre. A lot of the guys were pleasantly surprised, they were getting seven or eight tons an acre,”

Still, to put that in perspective, Burbrink said, “for a normal year you get 25 or 30 tons.”

Silage works well for cattle, but not for hogs, so Brookview is taking what they can get out of the field and will have to buy feed to make up for lost yields.

Locally, harvest progress is moving along, said Burbrink. “We seem to be on track. However, yields are pretty low. Dry land corn I’ve heard anywhere between 20 and 80. A lot more closer to 40 and 50,” he said. Normally,“you’re probably pushing 170, 180” in some parts of the county.

Irrigated corn hasn’t seen as significant of a drop, “but it has a big cost to it, not only fuel cost but human cost,” said Burbrink.

Across the state, corn harvest is ahead of normal, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service weekly report issued Monday afternoon.

In northern Indiana, 28 percent of the corn is harvested. Statewide, the five-year average has harvest at 22 percent done by now.

Twenty percent of the soybeans in the northern part of the state have been harvested, compared to 22 percent for the statewide five-year average.

In addition to combines harvesting corn and soybeans, some farmers are out cutting hay, which was also hurt by earlier drought but improved again once rains returned in August.

“Hay yields seem to be bouncing back quite a bit,” Burbrink said. It’s even possible that farmers could cut a little more hay at the end of the month, though “It’s awfully late,” he said. “If it’s warm and moist enough maybe they can get a little more.”