The bare soil surface is what jumps out at me. This will have several negative impacts on growing conditions.

Look at the third picture down. You can see in that one area its on the verge of �gulley erosion�. There are several different classifications of erosion depending on the severity. A couple more that I recall are rill erosion and sheet erosion. If you look in the field where you see the little places that look like rows of dirt with pure sand between them...that is rill erosion. The pure sand is caused from the individual soil particles separating and then falling out of suspension as the water flows across the surface. Gulley erosion is one of the more severe forms. It�s not just the messed up little ditch in the field that is the problem. What we are more concerned about is the massive of amount of water flow across the surface of the field that had to occur to cause this type of gulley to form. The top inch of dirt across the field was likely eroded and at least partially leached of nutrients. There was large amounts of water running out of that field during these heavy rain showers we�ve been getting and with it goes a lot of the fert. This is one of the reasons why water flow is so important.

Another negative impact that�s occurring��If we have that much water flowing out of the field then its not going down into the soil. That means when the rain stops and the hot and dry conditions get cranked back up like we�re seeing now�.then your soil dries out very fast because it didn�t actually absorb a lot of rain deep into the soil profile. This drying out process is also hastened by the fact that the bare soil is directly exposed to the sun. Soil temps will soar this coming week in that plot to temps near 110 degrees while the plots with a thatch roof will stay more moderated and likely not get out of the 80�s. These types of soil conditions can toast a crop of seedlings.