(TNS) — Pennsylvania has been hammered with rain over the past few weeks, bringing flooding and damage to property and homes, as well as risks to public safety.

But as the rains continue, the threat extends even to crops growing in Pennsylvania farms.

When asked about the frequent precipitation, Kyle Elliot, director of the Weather Information Center at Millersville University, replied “yeah, no kidding.”

“It’s the same tropical air mass that’s been with us now for, gosh, the better part of three, three and a half weeks,” he said.

The good news is that there is currently “absolutely no drought left anywhere across the entire state,” he said.

However, he added that “you can have too much of a good thing.”

“If you’ve been driving around Lancaster County, York, Dauphin, Lebanon counties? I haven’t seen the corn this high in years in mid-July,” Elliot said. “But other crops, they don’t do as well with an excessive amount of water in a short amount of time.”

An obvious risk with “localized but catastrophic flash flooding” is simply that young crops could be washed away, he said.

“I’ve seen that happen here in York County,” Elliot said. “My aunt actually knows a guy that grows some crops up west of Dover, and he has this little like rivulet that runs through his backyard. It’s usually an inch or two deep. The other day, he had four inches of rain in two hours, and it turned into a raging torrent. It basically tore his garden right out.”

Most farms might not have to worry about such a specific crisis, but heavy rains are definitely taking a toll.

“I would say [the rain] is just throwing a wrench in their management in general,” said Heidi Reed, an agronomy educator with Penn State Extension.

“This amount of rain would have been welcomed spread over six months,” Reed said. “But we’ve gotten it in two months, and just a handful of really severe events on top of it.”

Conditions in spring “actually started out very dry,” she said. And that meant many farmers delayed plantings, and waited for wetter conditions.

“And then the rain started, and didn’t stop,” she said. “So some farmers were not able to plant until June, when they would have liked to have been planting in late April or early May.”

That delay gives farmers a shorter window to successfully grow a crop before frosts come at the end of the season, she said.

And that is just one way that continued rains have caused complications for time management. Everything from applying fertilizer to weed control is delayed with rain.

“We need a couple dry days to actually get work done in the field, and we haven’t gotten that,” Reed said.

Reed specializes in field and forage crops, such as corn, soybeans, wheat and hay.

And while corn may indeed be thriving with heavy humidity, so do weeds and fungus.

“Some species of fungi like hot conditions, and all of them like wet conditions,” Reed said. “So, yeah, it’s proliferating.”

One particular concern, she said, is a fungus that feeds on grain.

“Our wheat crop, which in this region of the state, has almost totally been harvested at this point: there’s a fungus that can impact the grain that severely reduces the quality,” she said. “And we’re seeing a lot of that. So grain buyers are having a hard time finding high quality wheat to make flour, for example. That’s been a huge problem this summer.”

Harvesting hay has also been particularly hard hit with the frequent rain.

“To make hay, the farmers will mow the grass or alfalfa, and then spread it out on the field so that it can dry,” Reed said. “It needs to lose enough moisture that it will store. And if it is stored too wet, it can cause big problems.”

Wet hay can turn moldy and spoil, she said, or become infected by bacteria. And heat from bacterial activity among otherwise dry hay “can spark a fire.”

“If it’s stored too late, it can combust,” Reed said. “It’s been so, so wet though this year, with very few stretches of more than two or three days of sun, that many farmers haven’t even made their second cutting of hay.”

And as hay is often used for animal feed, there’s a domino effect for farmers.

“They’re probably thinking about feed shortages, potentially, or sourcing feed and forage from elsewhere, which can increase costs,” Reed said. “Uncertainty is part of farming, but it’s really elevated this year.”

Even rapidly-growing corn can grow too rapidly.

“The corn that was planted early in April, the people who were lucky to get it in, then that corn is tasseling and starting to grow an ear at this point,” Reed said. “And that means it’s at a stage where, if we get heavy storms — heavy rain, heavy wind — it’s it can be susceptible to lodging or falling over like snapping. So, so that’s a concern as well.”

And while most crops aren’t likely to be washed away in a flood, any amount of flooding on farmland is still extremely bad news.

“Anytime an area is flooded for significant period, more than a day or so? Plants need oxygen to respire, just like we do,” Reed said. “When they don’t have oxygen, they can their plant health goes down quickly, and yield can be severely reduced.”

And floodwater itself is often contaminated with all kinds of pollutants, ranging from sewage to heavy metals.

“We don’t want to be consuming those type of crops that have been covered in flood water, because you just don’t know where that water came from,” Reed said. “So, yeah, it’s bad all around.”

While the weather is never fully predictable, certain patterns are a big part of farming.

In recent years, Reed said, Pennsylvania farmers have largely noticed an additional week or two of warm weather, extending the growing season.

“I think more of what they notice with with the rainfall is that it’s irregular,” she added. “It used to be, we have a pretty wet spring, and then we have a hot summer with summer storms, and maybe a week or two a drought. But it was kind of predictable. Now, it’s just like there is no normal anymore.”